Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/04/08/midwestern_girl_gone_wild.php
Friday, April 8, 2005
With tales of misplaced squid, school-sponsored drag dances, and scrotum songs sung to the tune of the "Colonel Bogey March," Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep could be about the cutesy antics of a freshman girl at this very school if I hadn't known better. Fortunately for the reader, the shy and unsure fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora makes for a much more endearing and honest protagonist than your average Dartmouth freshman. Much like Lee, Sittenfeld begins in a tentative and awkward manner, exuding a fourteen-year-old's desire for acceptance and affirmation in her maiden novel.
In spite of their initial awkwardness, Sittenfeld's first chapters provide a frank and brutally honest picture of the Ault School—in all its glory and ridiculousness. The daughter of a South Bend, Indiana, mattress dealer, Lee is marked as an outsider at the prestigious East Coast boarding school from the beginning, a role she is never entirely able to shrug off in this gilded environment. As the novel progresses, Lee begins to find her place within the high school, accumulating a few close friends and a secret beau. But, by the time, Prep winds to a close, she is shaken from her modest niche by a meddling, agenda-peddling reporter from the New York Times who twists her off-the-record words into an exposÈ on the school's lack of diversity and its unequal treatment of scholarship students.
Though Sittenfeld may just be finding her voice in the first half of the novel, she cannot be faulted for tiptoeing around the issues most pertinent to adolescent life. In their place, we witness the unfortunate scenarios that communal living brings about, as token mean girl Aspeth (yes, Aspeth) announces, "I just want to say that whoever is leaving pubic hair in the bathroom sink, could you please clean it up? It's really gross." The situation is rendered even more precious when Lee discovers the lone African American girl in the school applying hair oil over the bathroom sink and comes to the profound conclusion that "they were head hairs, Little's head hairs." The problem of the mysterious hairs is resolved when Little is expelled for a series of thefts.
Sittenfeld remains even-handed in her commentary, choosing a random assortment of teenage targets, going so far as to include Lee's momentary, and ill-advised, romantic brush with an older townie who works in the school kitchen. We have the Korean roommate, Sin-Jun, who misplaces a squid in the room and in apology says something that surely could have been lifted from any poorly-scripted teen movie: "I so sorry about squid...I was bad roommate." Sittenfeld also chooses Sin-Jun as the emotionally unstable member of Lee's class, whose later suicide attempt over a failing lesbian love affair necessitates her return to Korea.
This frankness is audacious, though unfortunately too good to last. But, before I discuss the second half of the book, I would like to take a moment to let the folks at Buzzflood know that Lee's sophomore English teacher evidently had "the legs of someone who'd played field hockey at Dartmouth." A high compliment indeed.
As Sittenfeld's prose begins to congeal in the middle chapters, a bad case of the sixteen-year-mopes manages to put a damper on the novel's progress. When Lee's ultimate crush Cross Sugarman comes crawling into her bed for the first time in the wee hours of the morning, smelling sweetly of illegally-consumed alcohol, we see the beginning of the end for the novel. The underground wit of the first chapters disappears and is replaced by a neediness and lovesickness that are horrific in both their violence and duration. As Lee begins to spend her hours pining for Cross and experiencing new sexual awakenings, the plot falls a bit flat, and all the disgustingly graphic descriptions of first attempts at oral sex in the world wouldn't be enough to revive it.
Ultimately, both Prep's failure and its success lay in what the reader makes of its abundant ambiguities. With her acceptance to the University of Michigan in hand, Lee leaves Ault having alienated her classmates and having lost the affections of her secret love. However, she also returns to the Midwest having spent her high school befriending, analyzing, and occasionally hooking up with the elite she once found so alien. Likewise, Sittenfeld's creation is thin on action and relentlessly self-conscious; at the same time, these very characteristics allow for a thorough and accurate exploration of her teenage protagonist's psyche. While only time will tell whether this novel will someday adorn high school reading lists alongside The Catcher in the Rye, as one commentator recently predicted, it is more certain that Prep constitutes an earnest and sometimes poignant rendering of the East Coast educational establishment.