From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–When Lee Fiona arrives at Boston's prestigious Ault boarding school for her freshman year, she enters a world unlike anything she knew in South Bend, IN. "I always worried that someone would notice me," she says of her first bewildering weeks at the school. "And then when no one did, I felt lonely." This dilemma follows her throughout her four years. In her senior year, when she hooks up with star basketball player Cross Sugarman, she asks that he keep their relationship quiet. But she is appalled when she suspects that he has done just that. Sittenfeld has exquisitely captured the angst of the outsider in this fine coming-of-age novel. Lee is 24 when she recounts her boarding school history. Those few years' perspective give her an authentic voice that makes her sound less eccentric and more mainstream than Salinger's Holden Caulfield. Lee's world is peopled with the geeks and greats of the high school years–super-popular Aspeth Montgomery, who warns Lee away from a relationship with a townie; Aubrey, her math tutor, who professes his unrequited love; and enigmatic Cross, who initiates Lee into sex, but seems less than the full-fledged boyfriend she craves. Much more than stereotypes, Prep's characters, in their depth and humanity, will appeal to readers, who will find themselves rooting for Lee despite her foibles and her insecurities. Her moments of self-doubt will reverberate with adolescents everywhere.–Patricia Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library System, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Any feelings of nostalgia for adolescence should be dispelled by the exacting intimacies of this first novel. Lee Fiora, a scholarship student at the prestigious Ault School (not Ault Academy, as her parents embarrassingly refer to it), negotiates her days there in a blaze of self-consciousness that is, by turns, hilarious and excruciating: "I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible." And yet she becomes an expert on the rituals that govern the rarefied microenvironment in which she finds herself: the students' fondness for catchphrases like "therein lies the paradox" and "LMC" (lower middle class); the taboo against enthusiasm for anything other than sports; the fact that the school always sings "God be with you till we meet again" at chapel before breaks. In the end, Lee's incisive vision of herself and others is her downfall but also—as this richly textured narrative suggests—her greatest gift.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker Sittenfeld explores the psychology of adolescence in her debut novel, putting her in a category of writers that includes J.D. Salinger, Tobias Wolff, and John Knowles. Critics hail the novel as semi-autobiographical; Sittenfeld grew up in Cincinnati and attended prep school at Groton. Thus she knows firsthand the complicated social and academic pressures at an elite, moneyed schooland the raw emotions that accompany girls on the "outside." At times, Lees experience is hilarious; at others, its heartbreaking. The authors dialogue is excellent overall, but sometimes Lee sounds too precocious. In addition, she never achieves the "a-ha!" moment we expect from a level-headed Midwestern gal. Then again, perhaps thats what teen angst is all about. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
"The world was so big!" 17-year-old Lee thinks in wonder as she prepares to graduate from Ault, the tony East Coast prep school that provides the setting for this bittersweet coming-of-age novel. A scholarship student from South Bend, Indiana, the relentlessly introspective and self-absorbed Lee has always regarded herself as an invisible outsider, "one of the mild, boring, peripheral girls." No wonder she's astonished when the most popular boy in class shows up in her bedroom one night, and they begin an increasingly intimate affair that lasts throughout their senior year. It's no surprise at all, however, that it should end badly. For the denouement, like so much else in this first novel, is simply too predictable. Saving the book from formula, however, are some fine writing and assorted shrewd insights into both the psychology of adolescence and the privileged world of a traditional prep school. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Curtis Sittenfeld is a young writer with a crazy amount of talent. Her sharp and economical prose reminds us of Joan Didion and Tobias Wolff. Like them, she has a sly and potent wit, which cuts unexpectedly–but often–through the placid surface of her prose. Her voice is strong and clear, her moral compass steady; I’d believe anything she told me.”
–Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
“Speaking in a voice as authentic as Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and McCullers’ Mick Kelly, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Lee Fiora tells unsugared truths about adolescence, alienation, and the sociology of privilege. Prep’s every sentence rings true. Sittenfeld is a rising star.”
–Wally Lamb, author of She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True
“In her deeply involving first novel, Curtis Sittenfeld invites us inside the fearsome echo chamber of adolescent self-consciousness. But Prep is more than a coming of age story–it’s a study of social class in America, and Sittenfeld renders it with astonishing deftness and clarity.”
–Jennifer Egan, author of Look at Me
“Sittenfeld ensconces the reader deep in the world of the Ault School and the churning mind of Lee Fiora (a teenager as complex and nuanced as those of Salinger), capturing every vicissitude of her life with the precision of a brilliant documentary and the delicacy and strength of a poem.”
–Thisbe Nissen, author of Osprey Island
“Open Prep and you’ll travel back in time: Sittenfeld’s novel is funny, smart, poignant, and tightly woven together, with a very appealing sense of melancholy.”
–Jill A. Davis, author of Girls’ Poker Night
“Prep does something considerable in the realm of discussing class in American culture. The ethnography on adolescence is done in pitch-perfect detail. Stunning and lucid.”
–Matthew Klam, author of Sam the Cat
Funny, excruciatingly honest, improbably sexy, and studded with hard-won, eccentric wisdom about high school, heartbreak, and social privilege. One of the most impressive debut novels in recent memory.”
–Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and Election
About the Author
Curtis Sittenfeld won the Seventeen magazinefiction writing contest in 1992, at age sixteen, and The Mississippi Review’s annual fiction contest in 1998. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, and Real Simple, and on public radio’s This American Life. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. Sittenfeld was the 2002—2003 writer in residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., where she continues to work as a part-time as an English teacher.
From The Washington Post
In a memorable passage near the opening of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's narrator, Charles Ryder, reflects on how "easy" it is, "retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or false innocence." The same double-edged temptation often derails first-time novelists, who end up enervating the protagonist-version of themselves with one or the other pretension. Not, however, Curtis Sittenfeld, whose gripping debut effort, Prep, gives us a more accurate picture of adolescence as an unlovely mix of utter cluelessness, extreme sensitivity and untempered drives. Set at a (remarkably thinly) veiled Groton School, which Sittenfeld has for some reason here given a stumbling-block of a name -- Ault -- Prep tells the story of Lee Fiora, a middle-class Midwesterner who, prompted by an idle comment of her father's about rich people sending their sons to boarding school, packs herself off to one of the most famous. White, unathletic, trust fund-less, possessed of no special qualification that might serve to legitimize her existence in Ault's breathtakingly rarefied milieu, Lee manages, just barely, to make a single friend by the end of her freshman year. The next three years of misery in paradise are hardly any better, as our heroine sits out soccer games and school dances and long weekends in her dorm room, all the while tormented by a killer crush on one Cross Sugarman, the embodiment of Ault-typical privilege and ease.
Despite her day-to-day agony at Ault, the intensity of Lee's experience gives it from the outset its own throbbing, undeniable legitimacy. Effectively captured by Sittenfeld in a series of representative incidents -- parents' weekend, a school-wide game of "Assassin," a suicide attempt by a former roommate -- Lee's four years at the school she later recalls as "often unhappy . . . and yet my unhappiness was so alert and expectant; really, it was, in its energy, not that different from happiness." In a nice move that makes for pleasurable reading, Sittenfeld peoples Prep not only with Lee and her immediate circle of acquaintances but with the dozens of students, teachers and even dining-hall workers who make up boarding-school life and in some ways shape Lee's experience. We meet senior prefects Gates Medkowski and Henry Thorpe; Darden Pittard, "our class's cool black guy"; and Tullis Haskell, the guy who plays (naturally) James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" on guitar in the winter talent show. But the novel never slows, due to Sittenfeld's perfect pacing and almost reportorial knack for describing what it's like -- psychologically, logistically -- to be 15. Recounting a chance encounter with Cross Sugarman that leads to their seeing a film together, Lee extrapolates: "For the whole movie, I had that sense of heightened awareness that is like discomfort but is not discomfort exactly -- a tiring, enjoyable vigilance. I did not get a grasp on the movie's plot, or the names of any of the characters. Then it was over and the lights came on. . . . Maybe this was the place Cross and I would part ways, I thought. And maybe we wouldn't even say good-bye, now that he was with his friends again; maybe I was just supposed to know."
Occasionally, Sittenfeld's eye for detail is a bit too literal: Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Groton may endure a squirmy moment or two when particulars such as the school's setting on "the Circle," the green jacket worn to announce a surprise holiday or the newspaper gossip column, "Low Notes," are transplanted. Not to mention -- full disclosure -- having a character who is a dead ringer for your husband turn up on page 72.
It seems likely that Lee Fiora will be compared to Holden Caulfield, and it is high time someone wrote the girl's boarding-school novel. But Lee is no disaffected Salingeresque anti-hero coolly outing phonies. Despite the novel's preppy setting (and cringe-worthy title -- an odd misstep), Sittenfeld's narrator, in her naked ambition, her unapologetic desire and moral ambivalence, has much more in common with, say, Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus. This is a girl who lusts, cheats, trades up a loser friend for a better one and is embarrassed to be caught talking to a townie -- all, basically, to position herself for a chance to hook up with Cross Sugarman.
And this is the great risk that Sittenfeld takes: It's comparatively easy to write a novel about a young man trying to be socially acceptable enough to get into a girl's pants. The neurotically self-aware, unrequited (or briefly requited) male lover has been a stock character since the 12th century. To put a teenage girl in the same position is a much bigger gamble because, even now, it defies our expectations.
One of the most poignant moments in Prep comes when Sittenfeld's narrator articulates the other problem with being a girl who is not one of the rich beauties tying knots in their hair with pencils (or even an artsy, depressive type like Esther Greenwood of Plath's The Bell Jar) but a smart, self-conscious girl with ordinary looks and a sense of humor: It isn't, after all, simply that one wants to date the boys. As Lee explains, "The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn't romantic, but I wasn't sure what else it might be. But now I know: 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 [expletive] sure of my place in the world." It's this kind of insightful, unexpectedly candid observation that lends a dignity to Lee's time at Ault, enabling her in some way to transcend its social hierarchies -- not that she would ever want to.
Reviewed by Caitlin Macy
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. Thieves
Freshman fall
I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up. Ancient History was my first class of the day, occurring after morning chapel and roll call, which was not actually roll call but a series of announcements that took place in an enormous room with twenty-foot-high Palladian windows, rows and rows of desks with hinged tops that you lifted to store your books inside, and mahogany panels on the walls—one for each class since Ault’s founding in 1882—engraved with the name of every person who had graduated from the school. The two senior prefects led roll call, standing at a desk on a platform and calling on the people who’d signed up ahead of time to make announcements. My own desk, assigned alphabetically, was near the platform, and because I didn’t talk to my classmates who sat around me, I spent the lull before roll call listening to the prefects’ exchanges with teachers or other students or each other. The prefects’ names were Henry Thorpe and Gates Medkowski. It was my fourth week at the school, and I didn’t know much about Ault, but I did know that Gates was the first girl in Ault’s history to have been elected prefect.
The teachers’ announcements were straightforward and succinct: Please remember that your adviser request forms are due by noon on Thursday. The students’ announcements were lengthy—the longer roll call was, the shorter first period would be—and filled with double entendres: Boys’ soccer is practicing on Coates Field today, which, if you don’t know where it is, is behind the headmaster’s house, and if you still don’t know where it is, ask Fred. Where are you, Fred? You wanna raise your hand, man? There’s Fred, everyone see Fred? Okay, so Coates Field. And remember—bring your balls.
When the announcements were finished, Henry or Gates pressed a button on the side of the desk, like a doorbell, there was a ringing throughout the schoolhouse, and we all shuffled off to class. In Ancient History, we were making presentations on different topics, and I was one of the students presenting that day. From a library book, I had copied pictures of the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Baths of Diocletian, then glued the pictures onto a piece of poster board and outlined the edges with green and yellow markers. The night before, I’d stood in front of the mirror in the dorm bathroom practicing what I’d say, but then someone had come in, and I’d pretended I was washing my hands and left.
I was third; right before me was Jamie Lorison. Mrs. Van der Hoef had set a podium in the front of the classroom, and Jamie stood behind it, clutching index cards. “It is a tribute to the genius of Roman architects,” he began, “that many of the buildings they designed more than two thousand years ago still exist today for modern peoples to visit and enjoy.”
My heart lurched. The genius of Roman architects was my topic, not Jamie’s. I had difficulty listening as he continued, though certain familiar phrases emerged: the aqueducts, which were built to transport water . . . the Colosseum, originally called the Flavian Amphitheater . . .
Mrs. Van der Hoef was standing to my left, and I leaned toward her and whispered, “Excuse me.”
She seemed not to have heard me.
“Mrs. Van der Hoef?” Then—later, this gesture seemed particularly humiliating—I reached out to touch her forearm. She was wearing a maroon silk dress with a collar and a skinny maroon belt, and I only brushed my fingers against the silk, but she drew back as if I’d pinched her. She glared at me, shook her head, and took several steps away.
“I’d like to pass around some pictures,” I heard Jamie say. He lifted a stack of books from the floor. When he opened them, I saw colored pictures of the same buildings I had copied in black-and-white and stuck to poster board.
Then his presentation ended. Until that day, I had never felt anything about Jamie Lorison, who was red-haired and skinny and breathed loudly, but as I watched him take his seat, a mild, contented expression on his face, I loathed him.
“Lee Fiora, I believe you’re next,” Mrs. Van der Hoef said.
“See, the thing is,” I began, “maybe there’s a problem.”
I could feel my classmates looking at me with growing interest. Ault prided itself on, among other things, its teacher-student ratio, and there were only twelve of us in the class. When all their eyes were on me at once, however, that did not seem like such a small number.
“I just can’t go,” I finally said.
“I beg your pardon?” Mrs. Van der Hoef was in her late fifties, a tall, thin woman with a bony nose. I’d heard that she was the widow of a famous archaeologist, not that any archaeologists were famous to me.
“See, my presentation is—or it was going to be—I thought I was supposed to talk about—but maybe, now that Jamie—”
“You’re not making sense, Miss Fiora,” Mrs. Van der Hoef said. “You need to speak clearly.”
“If I go, I’ll be saying the same thing as Jamie.”
“But you’re presenting on a different topic.”
“Actually, I’m talking about architecture, too.”
She walked to her desk and ran her finger down a piece of paper. I had been looking at her while we spoke, and now that she had turned away, I didn’t know what to do with my eyes. My classmates were still watching me. During the school year so far, I’d spoken in classes only when I was called on, which was not often; the other kids at Ault were enthusiastic about participating. Back in my junior high in South Bend, Indiana, many classes had felt like one-on-one discussions between the teacher and me, while the rest of the students daydreamed or doodled. Here, the fact that I did the reading didn’t distinguish me. In fact, nothing distinguished me. And now, in my most lengthy discourse to date, I was revealing myself to be strange and stupid.
“You’re not presenting on architecture,” Mrs. Van der Hoef said. “You’re presenting on athletics.”
“Athletics?” I repeated. There was no way I’d have volunteered for such a topic.
She thrust the sheet of paper at me, and there was my name, Lee Fiora—Athletics, in her writing, just below James Lorison—Architecture. We’d signed up for topics by raising our hands in class; clearly, she had misunderstood me.
“I could do athletics,” I said uncertainly. “Tomorrow I could do them.”
“Are you suggesting that the students presenting tomorrow have their time reduced on your behalf?”
“No, no, of course not. But maybe a different day, or maybe—I could do it whenever. Just not today. All I’d be able to talk about today is architecture.”
“Then you’ll be talking about architecture. Please use the lectern.”
I stared at her. “But Jamie just went.”
“Miss Fiora, you are wasting class time.”
As I stood and gathered my notebook and poster board, I thought about how coming to Ault had been an enormous error. I would never have friends; the best I’d be able to hope for from my classmates would be pity. It had already been obvious to me that I was different from them, but I’d imagined that I could lie low for a while, getting a sense of them, then reinvent myself in their image. Now I’d been uncovered.
I gripped either side of the podium and looked down at my notes. “One of the most famous examples of Roman architecture is the Colosseum,” I began. “Historians believe that the Colosseum was called the Colosseum because of a large statue of the Colossus of Nero which was located nearby.” I looked up from my notes. The faces of my classmates were neither kind nor unkind, sympathetic nor unsympathetic, engaged nor bored.
“The Colosseum was the site of shows held by the emperor or other aristocrats. The most famous of these shows was—” I paused. Ever since childhood, I have felt the onset of tears in my chin, and, at this moment, it was shaking. But I was not going to cry in front of strangers. “Excuse me,” I said, and I left the classroom.
There was a girls’ bathroom across the hall, but I knew not to go in there because I would be too easy to find. I ducked into the stairwell and hurried down the steps to the first floor and out a side door. Outside it was sunny and cool, and with almost everyone in class, the campus felt pleasantly empty. I jogged toward my dorm. Maybe I would leave altogether: hitchhike to Boston, catch a bus, ride back home to Indiana. Fall in the Midwest would be pretty but not overly pretty—not like in New England, where they called the leaves foliage. Back in South Bend, my younger brothers would be spending the evenings kicking the soccer ball in the backyard and coming in for dinner smelling like boy-sweat; they’d be deciding on their Halloween costumes, and when my father carved the pumpkin, he would hold the knife over his head and stagger toward my brothers with a maniacal expression on his face, and as they ran shrieking into the other room, my mother would say, “Terry, quit scaring them.”
I reached the courtyard. Broussard’s dorm was one of eight on the east side of campus, four boys’ dorms and four girls’ dorms forming a square, with granite benches in the middle. When I looked out the window of my room, I often saw couples using the benches, the boy sitting with his legs spread in front of him, the girl standing between his legs, her hand...
I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.Highlighted by 94 Kindle readers
