Curtis Sittenfeld: Prep

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Hannah Davies

Prep - Curtis Sittenfield

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Prep is an American boarding school novel for adults that neatly subverts the genre without descending into parody. I was brought up on Mallory Towers and The Chalet School, so I was predisposed to like this novel. Curtis Sittenfeld could have made it all about a talking dog with a magic bone and I would have read it. Hell, she could have left out all the verbs and I probably would have ploughed through to the end. Our heroine is snarky, sarky Lee, fourteen at the start of the book and on her way to the exclusive co-ed Ault School. As a scholarship girl, and not particularly pretty or strikingly academic, she feels out of place amongst the sleek, chic student body. However, as she grows up and slowly begins to accept herself, come graduation she has learned valuable lessons about both herself and the wider world. Only, not really. Prep essentially does to boarding school cliche’s what the Shrek franchise has done to fairytales. All the typical elements are here, but Sittenfeld twists them around to create a far darker and more complex world.

Lee is not exactly a typical sweet-natured heroine, kept down by shyness and lack of a trust fund. Almost her every action is calculated to bring her closer to Cross Sugerman, a popular jock and the object of her desire, and this is brilliantly encapsulated during one of the set-pieces of the book, a game of Assassin. As Lee says, “Life is clearest when guided by ulterior motives.” She dumps her first friend in favour of another, more socially acceptable classmate, and is unable to start a relationship with a man who works in the school kitchen for fear that her peers will shun her. Indeed, one of the things Sittenfeld does so well is to highlight the way in which teenage outsiders sometimes take on board, and act on, the values of the popular crowd - the very values which make them outsiders — and in this way, their isolation becomes partly self-enforcing. This is the case with Lee, who spends a significant part of the book doing laundry instead of attending school dances and trying her hardest to avoid breaking the unspoken codes: as she says, “…over time at Ault, I’d realised that it was an act of aggression not to react to a situation as everyone else was reacting”.

In common with most literary outsiders, Lee is a sharp observer of her surroundings. Her viewpoint is unrelentingly cynical: she says of one member of the popular group, “People genuinely liked him, and on top of that they liked the fact that they genuinely liked a big black guy from the Bronx.” She is also honest about her own feelings, describing in detail her jealousy when her roommate is elected prefect. Yet Lee is not always entirely clear-sighted, and she is surprised when her classmates react in ways that contradict her fixed image of them. Just when, towards the end of the book, Lee seems to have found her niche at Ault, her behaviour suddenly veers off into a very public self-destruction that makes for a highly effective finish.

Sittenfeld uses an episodic structure that is reminiscent of Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, with each section based around various incidents from every semester. This is a particularly satisfying device, which allows Sittenfeld to convey Lee’s progress through the school without overwhelming the reader with detail; the pacing is perfect. There is a wide cast of supporting characters, each finely drawn. Even the popular characters are just nuanced enough to avoid being mere stereotypes.

Curtis Sittenfeld has produced a superb first novel: a teenage narrative that is firmly aimed at adults but that is not Mean Girls-style satire or a coming-of-age nostalgia-fest. Comparisons with Catcher in the Rye are inevitable. Lee is not easy to like; I think that’s why I like her so much.

Posted on August 22nd, 2007.

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