Prep

It's official: my mild crush on Curtis Sittenfeld has turned into a full-blown passion. Her smash debut novel, Prep, which is surely at least semi-autobiographical, follows diffident, middle class, Mid-western student Lee as she navigates a posh East Coast boarding school. I never wanted this novel to end. I was totally absorbed in Lee's agonising social awkwardness, her desperate attempts to fit in. As someone tells her towards the end of the book, 'You should have realised you're not that weird, or that being weird is not that bad.' (I'm paraphrasing.)  

Lee's experience at boarding school reminded me of my own life at residential college. At one point, Lee begins cutting people's hair; it gives her a social role, a confidence, an identity. That reminded me of the way I used to tell fortunes for my fellow students with tarot cards. The section where Lee faces expulsion from the school because she's failing pre-calcuus was viscerally distressing (mind you, I can't see how she could go from utter bafflement to a B or C the next year without ever actually understanding what she'd missed). The stakes are very low throughout -- no one's life is ever at stake -- but Lee's misery and joy are so closely observed that we feel her pain and delight in our own body.

I was fascinated to discover that Ault, the posh school in the novel, was based on Groton School in Connecticut which Sittenfeld herself attended, and which in turn featured as a filming location in the movie The Holdovers, which I watched over summer. So I can summon up some images of Lee's beautiful, traditional school surroundings. It was those images that she first fell in love with, just like I fell in love with the Oxford-style (or so I assumed) buildings of my college. Mind you, the students at my college didn't have ridiculous names like Horton, Aspeth, Gates (girls) Cross, Devin, and McGrath (boys). That's first names, not surnames, just to be clear.

Curtis Sittenfeld has just released a collection of short stories, which includes one featuring the characters from Prep. I'm in two minds about whether to read it, because I've heard mixed opinions, but I bet I won't be able to resist.