Review: prep school years

[rivkat]

Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep: I was going to wait until finishing Special Topics in Calamity Physics before reviewing the two books together, but that would be really unfair to the latter book, which is not trying to do the same thing at all. Prep made me think about what I want from art. I usually say I mostly read genre because big things happen instead of just domestic dramas, but actually what I want is to read about people being better, making bigger choices, the kinds of things I hope I would do in similar circumstances. Prep is like a technically stunning artistic rendition of a used tissue – it produced in me recognition and disgust, intimately tied together.

The book is about the protagonist Lee’s four years at prep school. She’s on scholarship at a fancy East Coast school from her home in Indiana. She applied for reasons she still finds difficult to explain, not unrelated to her prickly father, and stayed despite her immediate unhappiness. She is observant and deliberately passive in a way that would have impressed Bartleby the Scrivener, though really the literary antecedent is probably Babbitt: this is an unflinching insider’s view of a person determined to be dissatisfied, always watching others and constructing herself as an outsider – even though it’s also plain that insider status would have been denied her, given her scholarship status.

Lee reminded me of the worst parts of myself, especially myself in middle school. I went to middle and high school at an expensive private school; I was not on scholarship, but I was definitely on the lower economic end of the non-scholarship students, and it does change your relationship to money, though it’s hard to notice that while it’s happening, not least because nobody ever really talks about money any more than they talk about the oxygen they’re breathing. This is a theme that recurs in the book. More important – because this is not a book about class so much as a book in which class structures what happens – I recognize myself in Lee’s pettiness, in her abandonment of her one friend when she gets a chance to move slightly higher up in the social hierarchy.

Everything about Lee is petty, from her reactions to others’ misfortunes and good fortunes to her dramas of love and loss. The book is written from the perspective of a grown-up Lee, but perhaps just by virtue of being about Lee’s high school years it is solipsistic; Lee carefully observes but does not comment on the racism, sexism and classism she and her classmates accept – indeed, she almost never identifies those things as such. It’s not necessarily her job to do so, but this is the kind of realism that makes me happier with genre fiction, metaphors, and happy endings. Thinking about it, I have no good justification for escapism. But I can’t bring myself to want to read fiction that is the literary equivalent of looking at someone else’s (or really, my) clogged-up facial pores with a magnifying glass.

So: Obviously, the book produced a strong reaction in me. I just can’t imagine liking it for that reason.

Comments

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

I know the kind of fiction you mean. At its best, it's still an exquisitely delineated portrait of a person I wouldn't have wanted to spend time with in the first place. I'm willing to accept that for some readers, the exquisiteness of the delineation is the very thing that they keep on reading for . . . but I am not one of those readers, and sometimes I get cranky about the way that they've managed to take and hold the artistic high ground at the expense of those of us whose preferences are different.

[wearemany.livejournal.com]

i felt EXACTLY the same about this book. the only thing i found interesting and captivating on a non-nauseating level (well, sometimes it was nauseating, but at least it was interesting) was her love life, and even that only held me about halfway through. i finished it with a lot of annoyance and frustration that i'd given up any my life to read it. and i think you hit on why, in some ways -- experiencing that same poor kid/rich school thing is what solidified my politics, clarified painfully my own baser instincts while giving me more power and privilege, ultimately, with which to fight them and the institutional means by which they're enforced. i sort of hated lee for never even getting close to such an epiphany.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Right -- Lee has some sucky choices, but never seems to consider that they're choices. The adult POV points out that she was really passive, but seems to think that because she's noticed that now that somehow she is improved. Not so!

[haphazardmethod.livejournal.com]

I was not on scholarship, but I was definitely on the lower economic end of the non-scholarship students, and it does change your relationship to money, though it’s hard to notice that while it’s happening

Would you mind elaborating on this a little? I'm curious because I just sent my 5-year old off to an expensive school in which I'm sure we're the "economic diversity" end of the spectrum (the upper end being movie producers and hedge fund owners). While I'm sure he'll get a great academic education, I'm still not sure what to make of this social aspect. It is very far from my experience.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Sure -- not ignoring you, just need to wait until kids are in bed and I have a bit of time.

[haphazardmethod.livejournal.com]

No rush -- sorry to drop in unannounced to ask something like that. It struck a nerve with me, as just yesterday I watched one of the parents jump into a limo after dropping off his son on the first day and listened to other parents discussing their annual Christmas vacation trips to Hawaii/Europe/Belize. I knew it would be something of a culture shock but experiencing it was (as ever) something different. To me anyway. Sci (my son) might just accept it as normal. He'll certainly know what he is missing, which I didn't as a kid.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Okay, so my 7th-grade-and-up school was very politically liberal and very wealthy; I can't speak to other environments. The basic expectation of the students -- I don't recall the teachers' attitudes, though they were making less than public school teachers in general -- was that everybody could afford lots of clothes, vacations, dinners out, etc. I absorbed that attitude; though my group didn't put much emphasis on clothing, I spent a huge amount of my parents' money on travel for the debate team and other debate-related expenses. And the thing was, I didn't notice it. It really was like air. One of my middle-school friends occasionally couldn't afford things, and I was clueless about why (and really I only remember it in retrospect; I either ignored it or decided to ignore it as embarrassing at the time, and can't remember which). Another had to leave when her father stopped paying child support, and she was just gone, out of my life.

It's perfectly possible our kids are going to end up at this school, which provides a fabulous education. But if so it will be an effort to help them be mindful that they're getting a very different experience than most kids, and not because they're so awesome.

[accommodatingly.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean-- but I thought it was great. I suppose the observation and the psychology were enough for me.

Do you have similar reactions to sf (or other genre fiction) in which characters tend to make plausibly bad choices, find themselves in no-win situations, and generally fail to save the world or become better people? I'm thinking in particular of Octavia Butler, having recently finished Clay's Ark-- a book I bet you'd hate. (The one I teach is Mind of My Mind.)

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I love Butler, though I certainly hated plenty of her characters as people. Kindred is probably my favorite. (Reviews here (http://rivkat.livejournal.com/tag/au:+butler). It's not the questionable choices in bad circumstances that I mind as long as the protagonist understands the dilemmas.

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

Based on the reviews, I decided to pass on this book because I anticipated responding in ways very similar to the reaction that you describe. And I wasn't at all clear about whether the author had a more complex or ironic approach in mind that would enable a critique of the narrator -- it sounded quasi-autobiographical, which made me wonder whether it was more of an apologia.

I have a similarly squirmy/irritated reaction to Michel Houellebecq's books, though hopefully for rather different reasons.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I can't say that we're meant to identify with Lee -- I certainly think it's possible that we're supposed to judge her as harshly as I do. But I can't see any indication one way or the other, and so the book is an undigestible lump, though a very well-executed one, for me.