REVIEW: Prep
Aug. 31st, 2018 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllPrep: Curtis Sittenfeld. Black Swan, 2010.
I can’t pinpoint why I didn’t read this sooner. I’ve read ‘An American Wife’ and ‘Sisterland’ by Sittenfeld and was aware of this novel. Literature about American boarding schools has always fascinated me, mainly as a subset of the girls own genre because of the different context. You’d have thought I’d rush to read a novel in this setting by an author I admired, but I’ve seen more than one copy in a charity shop and passed it.
Well, a time came when I picked a copy up. As for reading it, I was on holiday for a few days and this accompanied me for most of them. As the book has a pervading sense of sadness that communicated itself to me, I was glad of a respite before returning to the final section, although that became a respite of over a week’s time, thanks to life getting busy.
‘Prep’ tells of narrator Lee Fiora’s time at Ault School, a boarding school in New England. The timing of the novel is ambiguous. You work out that it’s set in the 1990s from certain clues, but in a school that has many traditions, the young people could be getting their education in another era. This is addressed in one passage, where the narrator talks about how the young people at the school were into music that was twenty to thirty years old, wore old-fashioned clothes, phones were on the verge of becoming mobile and computers ubiquitous. The novel was first published in 2006.
Lee is there on a scholarship. Not rich like most of her peers, the smartest girl in her class in South Bend, Indiana, she loses her confidence at a school where the teacher-pupil ratio is one to a dozen. She does her work, follows the rules of the school and obsesses over Ault and her fellow students, their popularity, coolness and attractiveness. Obeying social rules of her own adolescent making, she is not a joiner. She is desperately unhappy, but convinces herself that the interest of life at Ault, of which she is an observer and participant – but never popular – is worth it.
Why did she decide to go there, you wonder, as she struggles academically and socially? Was it just because of the romantic idea sold in the prospectus? Is she such a snob as she seems to be? The novel is crystal clear on the way Lee judges attractiveness based on physical appearance, while underestimating the importance of personality. But then, partly out of naïveté, partly because she isn’t the smartest girl in this school, she is slow on the uptake with many social cues. As an introvert with some neuroses, but not most of the ones Lee carries about, I was aghast at times, sympathetic at others.
She has a romantic fixation on Cross Sugarman, a boy who seems to embody the image of the preppy schoolboys frozen in the photographs of the school prospectus and other promotional material Ault produces. These were some of the images that drew Lee to Ault. They have a few encounters over her first couple of years at the school that develop into something more in the senior year, but because of definitions Lee has created, it is less than she wanted. She also develops a friendship with Martha, a room-mate who alleviates a lot of Lee’s misery, but her relationship with her parents is inevitably altered. As the older Lee, who narrates, now realises, fourteen was very young to decide to leave home, rejecting the Midwest, rejecting their class, rejecting her upbringing and, as we see, changing her personality, a personality they’d nurtured, to some extent.
This novel borrows the pattern offered by a school year to any school story, but because this is a bulky literary novel, we cover Lee’s four years at Ault, as freshman, sophomore, junior and senior. You can compare her encounters with Gates, the girl prefect – one of the early ones, Ault having become co-educational only recently – with her relationship with the prefects when she too is a senior. The dorm arrangements, where dorms are named after the teacher responsible for a group of girls or boys who share triples, doubles or have a single room, and the school rules that Lee knows backwards and is usually keen on obeying, and so on are detailed. Lee makes for a great narrator in that sense.
The novel has a very satisfying ending, when Lee is both betrayed and betrayer. There’s a moment where her year’s catchphrase is brilliantly deployed. You can see the appeal of the subject, the school is a self-contained community, mainly populated by privileged teenagers who are still teenagers, growing up, observed closely by the heroine. We get an answer to the question of why Lee went there, we get analysis by the adult Lee of her younger self’s motivations and limitations – though no explanation of why adult Lee decided to write about her time there now, which felt like an odd gap. It ends with an acute awareness that these class-mates are done with childhood, will never come together in the same way, in what Lee sees as a shared endeavour, enclosed by the same buildings and land.
Did I enjoy it? I didn’t like the heroine much. I found the way that it examined class, wealth and privilege (Lee needs other people to point out how race is an issue) far more pointed than you normally get in American literature, or the limited amount I’ve read. It’s gripping, partly because of the sway that school stories have over me, and for me there was nostalgia for and distancing from the intensities of school and university (because that’s when I first lived away from home, and had to deal with the laundry) life.
My copy contained a short story, also about the influence of high school even into your thirties, by Sittenfeld.
I can’t pinpoint why I didn’t read this sooner. I’ve read ‘An American Wife’ and ‘Sisterland’ by Sittenfeld and was aware of this novel. Literature about American boarding schools has always fascinated me, mainly as a subset of the girls own genre because of the different context. You’d have thought I’d rush to read a novel in this setting by an author I admired, but I’ve seen more than one copy in a charity shop and passed it.
Well, a time came when I picked a copy up. As for reading it, I was on holiday for a few days and this accompanied me for most of them. As the book has a pervading sense of sadness that communicated itself to me, I was glad of a respite before returning to the final section, although that became a respite of over a week’s time, thanks to life getting busy.
‘Prep’ tells of narrator Lee Fiora’s time at Ault School, a boarding school in New England. The timing of the novel is ambiguous. You work out that it’s set in the 1990s from certain clues, but in a school that has many traditions, the young people could be getting their education in another era. This is addressed in one passage, where the narrator talks about how the young people at the school were into music that was twenty to thirty years old, wore old-fashioned clothes, phones were on the verge of becoming mobile and computers ubiquitous. The novel was first published in 2006.
Lee is there on a scholarship. Not rich like most of her peers, the smartest girl in her class in South Bend, Indiana, she loses her confidence at a school where the teacher-pupil ratio is one to a dozen. She does her work, follows the rules of the school and obsesses over Ault and her fellow students, their popularity, coolness and attractiveness. Obeying social rules of her own adolescent making, she is not a joiner. She is desperately unhappy, but convinces herself that the interest of life at Ault, of which she is an observer and participant – but never popular – is worth it.
Why did she decide to go there, you wonder, as she struggles academically and socially? Was it just because of the romantic idea sold in the prospectus? Is she such a snob as she seems to be? The novel is crystal clear on the way Lee judges attractiveness based on physical appearance, while underestimating the importance of personality. But then, partly out of naïveté, partly because she isn’t the smartest girl in this school, she is slow on the uptake with many social cues. As an introvert with some neuroses, but not most of the ones Lee carries about, I was aghast at times, sympathetic at others.
She has a romantic fixation on Cross Sugarman, a boy who seems to embody the image of the preppy schoolboys frozen in the photographs of the school prospectus and other promotional material Ault produces. These were some of the images that drew Lee to Ault. They have a few encounters over her first couple of years at the school that develop into something more in the senior year, but because of definitions Lee has created, it is less than she wanted. She also develops a friendship with Martha, a room-mate who alleviates a lot of Lee’s misery, but her relationship with her parents is inevitably altered. As the older Lee, who narrates, now realises, fourteen was very young to decide to leave home, rejecting the Midwest, rejecting their class, rejecting her upbringing and, as we see, changing her personality, a personality they’d nurtured, to some extent.
This novel borrows the pattern offered by a school year to any school story, but because this is a bulky literary novel, we cover Lee’s four years at Ault, as freshman, sophomore, junior and senior. You can compare her encounters with Gates, the girl prefect – one of the early ones, Ault having become co-educational only recently – with her relationship with the prefects when she too is a senior. The dorm arrangements, where dorms are named after the teacher responsible for a group of girls or boys who share triples, doubles or have a single room, and the school rules that Lee knows backwards and is usually keen on obeying, and so on are detailed. Lee makes for a great narrator in that sense.
The novel has a very satisfying ending, when Lee is both betrayed and betrayer. There’s a moment where her year’s catchphrase is brilliantly deployed. You can see the appeal of the subject, the school is a self-contained community, mainly populated by privileged teenagers who are still teenagers, growing up, observed closely by the heroine. We get an answer to the question of why Lee went there, we get analysis by the adult Lee of her younger self’s motivations and limitations – though no explanation of why adult Lee decided to write about her time there now, which felt like an odd gap. It ends with an acute awareness that these class-mates are done with childhood, will never come together in the same way, in what Lee sees as a shared endeavour, enclosed by the same buildings and land.
Did I enjoy it? I didn’t like the heroine much. I found the way that it examined class, wealth and privilege (Lee needs other people to point out how race is an issue) far more pointed than you normally get in American literature, or the limited amount I’ve read. It’s gripping, partly because of the sway that school stories have over me, and for me there was nostalgia for and distancing from the intensities of school and university (because that’s when I first lived away from home, and had to deal with the laundry) life.
My copy contained a short story, also about the influence of high school even into your thirties, by Sittenfeld.
