Prep is about the high school years of one Lee Fiora, who leaves her family in Indiana at age fourteen to attend boarding school in Massachusetts. Lee, now in her mid-twenties, tells her story in a first person narrative. Because of the time that has elapsed between the story's present and the era it tells of, she is able to observe her high school years semi-objectively, without forgetting what it felt like to be in the throes of the (seemingly) heart-wrenching debacles of the teenage years. As a result, I found myself reliving many of my own awkward, hormone-raging, cat-fighty, pseudo-disastrous high school experiences. Remember what it was like to have girl crushes, glow with pride at being the teacher's pet, and be used by teenage boys? In many ways, youth is not entirely unlike adulthood, but of course we all pretend it is so we can feel good about the fact that we've matured. Prep, however, is far from being a teen soap opera. Sittenfeld has a gift for expressing certain ideas and feelings with uncanny accuracy. Take, for instance, this passage, in which Lee describes her routine at the airport while waiting for her flight home:
"What I usually did was get an ice cream and eat it standing in front of a magazine rack, reading, and then, just before my plane boarded, I'd buy one magazine - an especially fat issue, which I'd purposely not have read in the store. There's be other Ault kids in the terminal, of course, an if we passed, we acknowledge one another, usually without speaking, but I didn't hang out with them. As a freshman, I'd been too intimidated....a bunch of students always sat in the back of the restaurant...smoking and talking noisily....and now that I was older, I was still intimidated...but I also wasn't particularly interested; I liked eating ice cream and reading magazines by myself.
But I had gotten no farther than the entrance to the ice cream shop when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned.
"When's your flight?" It was Horton Kinnelly. "You should come back with us"....
"That's okay", I said before remembering myself - Horton looked at me, but we both pretended I hadn't tried to decline the invitation - and adding, "okay sure"."
What follows is a description of the scene in the restaurant, which Lee finds somewhat awkward, but clearly only as a result of her self-conscious nature. I can TOTALLY relate to this situation. Even as an adult, that kind of thing happens to me all the time. In another passage, which I seem to be having difficulty locating for a quote, Lee talks about how once she has had a positive encounter what a person, it's best to make sure maximum amount of time possible passes before she has to see that person again. That way the good relationship can be preserved for as long as possible, as she will not be able to say something stupid and eff it up. I know EXACTLY how this feels but have never consciously acknowledged it before, even to myself. Like Alice Munro, Curtis Sittenfeld often seems to know readers better than they know themselves (that is if my experiences reading their books are at all common).
The other important aspect of Prep is the fact that Lee is a scholarship student at a prestigious boarding school, meaning she is one of the few middle class students amongst the children of the very wealthy. Because of her background, Lee often feels shoved to the periphery of the student body, a feeling that the adult Lee implies was largely unfounded in her narration. The theme of self-inflicted and/or imaginary exclusion is thus central to the story, which comes together extremely well.
No comments:
Post a Comment