Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

The first time I heard about Prep, someone was talking about it in my book editing class, and describing it as a guilty pleasure kind of book. So I was really expecting something like the Gossip Girl series, a slick package of gratuitous teen bitchery and sex. [Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the series, but having seen a few minutes of the new CW show, I don't think my assessment is far off.] When I saw the book on my roommate's bookshelf, I thought maybe it would be a good end-of-summer vice read. Color me surprised when the cover held a sticker proclaiming, "New York Times Book Review: One of the Top Ten Books of the Year!" Maybe the Times editors, like the thousands of people who made Prep a bestseller, enjoy a little Mean Girl drama too?

But what's this? The book has no uber-bitches, no rainbow parties. (Don't Google the latter if you have any faith left in the innocence of teenagers.) Instead, it's a fairly quiet coming-of-age book about a swank Massachusetts boarding school. The narratrix is Lee Fiora, a girl whose averageness (social, academic, economic) puts her on the wrong end of the social scale at the prestigious Ault School. However, this is mostly her own doing. She's too timid (and later, too apathetic) to compete with the rich kids--they're not really the ones keeping her alienated. Her crippling self-awareness stops her from engaging in any meaningful ways with her surroundings. However, despite her best efforts at hiding, she manages to acquire friends (or at least allies), and a bizarre, masochistic relationship with one of the chosen boys of her grade. There IS some non-PG stuff, but it's more the endearing, fumbly kind than the "oh my God, I can't believe I'm reading this" kind.

It's one of the slower and more maddening maturation narratives--and all the more real because of that. Kind of Holden-esque, in that you kind of want to shake Lee and make her do stuff in her own interest. And frankly, it scared me a little how much I understood Lee. When she gets into a shadowy "relationship" with social king Cross Sugarman, my cringes were for her, but also for all the times I let myself be the secret girlfriend. Most of the observational stuff is similarly incisive. Sittenfeld really nails what it's like to be the unspectacular kid trying to keep up with inflated circumstances.

The writing's quality comes from its ability to keep Lee's voice young, even though she's working from a much later vantage point. It's funny, light, and quick. The pacing gets a little wonky, moving unevenly through semesters, but it's not that big of a distraction. Overall, it's easy to see why so many people picked this book up, and why it was received so well--even without any mean girls involved.

Some bits I liked best:

"But I was living my life sideways. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. Grades felt peripheral, but the real problem was that everything felt peripheral."

During a game of "Assassins":
"I knew right away I had ruined it. Whatever jokiness had existed between us--I had killed the substance of it. McGrath would be friendly to me from now on...but the friendliness would be hollow. In killing him, I had ended the only overlap between our lives....McGrath didn't want to talk, of course, it wasn't as if we had anything to say to each other. I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny."

"When I think of Cross now, a big part of what I remember is that sense of waiting, of relying on chance. I couldn't go to his room--it was decided. And that meant that in order to convey to him my concern about his injury, I would have to run into him in the hall when few or no other students are around, and when I did, I'd have to quickly intuit his mood to find out if adjustments were to be made so that we could keep seeing each other.
I realize now: I ceded all the decisions to him. But that wasn't how it felt! At the time, it seemed so clear that the decisions belonged to him. Rules existed; they were unnamed and intractable."