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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.
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.
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