Sittenfeld has an exceptionally strong voice, and Prep has a lot of perceptive passages depicting adolescence--along with a tangle of outsider issues: gender, class, race, and self-esteem. The book is light on plot, and it drags in places, but the running commentary on class, sex, and self kept me turning the pages with interest.
Fitting in
Prep shows the start of Lee Fiora's awkward years, a period of feeling out of step and desperate to fit in. Is that due to the school, or is it Lee? Would she have struggled equally at her local high school? It's hard to say.Lee's plain-spoken Midwestern family are baffled by her desire to attend boarding school. Far from her family, Lee becomes someone they wouldn't recognize: not a snooty prep school girl but an unhappy, sneaky introvert, trying not to draw notice yet desperate for notice. (Lee could have been drawn from a brochure on low self-esteem in women.) Prep is full of canny little observations like this one:
On the circle, a bunch of boys were playing football, slipping and rolling in the grass. Listening to their cries, I felt a familiar jealousy of boys. I didn't want what they had, but I wished that I wanted what they wanted; it seemed like happiness was easier for them.Indeed, some of the book's best moments use that gender divide to highlight the outsider's wish to be someone. Lee feels alienated from the other girls because of their social confidence, their calm, or their polish; she envies the boys' seeming freedom from her anxieties:
I wanted to take up people's time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.
The boarding-school bildungsroman is... [not] really about the privilege that permeates the setting. Indeed, an anti-materialist tone generally creeps in, and... the protagonist will be having a miserable time.However, Lee couldn't be more different from Salinger's Holden Caulfield in her desperate desire to be part of the social hierarchy of the school. Lee behaves in ways her family would never understand, the start of a pattern in her life:
This was just the beginning! For years, there would be so many things I'd do for a guy that I wouldn't do in my usual life--jokes I wouldn't normally tell, places I wouldn't normally go, clothes I wouldn't normally wear, drinks I wouldn't normally drink, food I wouldn't normally eat or food I would normally eat but wouldn't eat in front of him.
Hemidemisemi-unreliable narrator
Sittenfeld manages to make the reader understand Lee and her surroundings more clearly than does Lee--but without undermining Lee as a narrator. It works because the teenage Lee isn't such an unreliable narrator that you can dismiss her perceptions; she excels at observing, and to some extent interpreting, life around her. Some of her self-analysis comes through hindsight as in the quote above, but most is relayed to us by her teenage self. She's more perceptive than many adults, but she flounders in applying it to herself and acting on it.Lee also fails in her understanding of others: she sees the people around her primarily as symbols of what she lacks. Lee's limited vision is both a strength and a weakness in Prep. The other characters aren't very fully realized, which is a drag for the reader. On the other hand, this self-centered narration is fitting for the teenager Lee is, and late in the book Lee is forced to recognize that her vision has been one-dimensional; that she's grossly misperceived several people.
Coming of age
I'd wondered if Prep would be chick lit. I'd say no. It's a conventional coming-of-age story enlivened by tensions of class, gender, and race. Compared to the classic coming-of-age novels it's lightweight; most of Lee's difficulties could be easily solved if any adult chose to take an interest. But most comings-of-age aren't as full of sturm und drang as, say, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As a candid eye into the head of an unhappy teenager, Prep is exceptional.I said the book drags. Could Sittenfeld have layered in such a number of class, gender, race, and coming-of-age issues in a shorter book? Possibly not. The boarding-school setting (a thinly disguised version of Groton School) creates a microcosm in which Lee confronts a variety of issues in a short time and a small community. Nevertheless, at times I felt the book tried to do too much. Much as I enjoyed all the keen observations and bon mots, and the layer upon layer of issues, it could have been tightened up in the interests of keeping the story moving.
Grade: B- for predictability; A- for perceptive, idiosyncratic writing. Overall... B+.
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