A Portrait of the Artist in Boarding School: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

I love the hell out of boarding school novels, and the reason for this is probably that I love the hell out of novels with child and teenaged protagonists. The boarding school bildungsroman, in particular, makes me want to tap dance all over the place because the gated and turreted school setting will doubtlessly serve to not only enclose and isolate a huge group of kids (some snobbish, some shy, all hormonal and crazed), but also serve as the perfect place for an insightful outsider to be miserable, to be observant of the rituals and mores of privileged classmates who at once intimidate, fascinate, and repel her, and to ultimately come into her own.



As a teenaged protagonist, Lee Fiora is pretty much the best we could ask for: self-conscious, ordinary, sensitive, and enormously observant. While her almost constant discomfort makes her appear by turns sullen and aloof to her classmates, Lee's interior life is rich. Her voice is strong, clear, uniquely insightful, and often heartbreaking. As a scholarship student at a school that costs $22, 000 per year in tuition and houses glamorous and wealthy students with names like Aspeth, Horton, Cross, and Tullis, she is obviously an outsider. At Ault School, Lee's once solid sense of identity is supremely challenged. Of her first bewildering weeks at Ault, she says, "I always worried that someone would notice me...and then when no one did, I felt lonely." What makes her character particularly realistic and complicated is her own role in maintaining her status as an outsider. For example, when a romantic relationship (albeit a sloppy and awkward one) begins to develop between Lee and the popular, easy-going Cross Sugarman, it is the insecure Lee who, in a misguided attempt to be accomodating, suggests that they keep it secret. She's hurt and appalled, however, when he does exactly that. The fact that her interior and exterior personalities are so different makes her a frustrating character, but it's also what makes her character so human and lovable. It's what makes all of us want, at least sometimes, to do high school all over again.

Some of the most touching parts of the book are the strangely nostalgic reminiscences offered up by the adult Lee- particularly those pertaining to her painful and disastrous relationship with Cross:

"I already recognized, even then, the sadness of another person lying on top of you. They will always leave (what's someone going to do, just lie there forever?) and that's the sad part. You can always feel the imminent loss.

It seemed to me, and it kept seeming like this for a long time, that this was what it was like to love a boy--to feel consumed. I'd awaken in the morning, without him, thinking, 'I love you so much, Cross.' Knowing that other people would not consider what went on between us to be love-- of course they wouldn't-- only made me more certain. When he arrived at night, tapping my shoulder in the dark, then the two of us walking down the hall to the day student room, then finally being in bed again, our bodies overlapping, my arms around his back-- that was one of the times when not telling him I loved him required willpower. Also when he was about to leave. I loved him so much! Later, with other guys, I'd think, 'Do I? Is this what it feels like? does love feel different with different people?' But with Cross I never wondered. There was nothing about him I didn't like. The other guys, guys in my future, were maybe too tall but as slim as girls, they listened to classical music and drank wine and liked modern art, and they seemed to me like sissies. Or we had enough to say to each other to fill an evening, we could go to a baseball game, but it never stopped being an effort. Or their fingers were--not stubby, but not long and sure. If I kissed these guys, I'd wonder if it would turn out to be an obligation, if I was moving forward into a situation from which I'd later have to extricate myself. It's not that they were unattractive, and they weren't boring either. But I never thought of what Cross wasn't. I never had to explain or defend him to myself. I didn't even care what we talked about. It was never a compromise. Or maybe for him it was. But it never was for me."

And later,

"I heard him swallow, and then--all this time, he had been holding the basketball against his right hip--he leaned down and set the ball against the floor. When he was upright again, he said, 'Lee...' and when I dared to glance at him, he was looking at me in a way that was both predatory and tender (I do not think it's an exaggeration to say that my life since then has been in pursuit of that look, and that I have yet to find it a second time in just that balance; perhaps it doesn't, after high school, exist in that balance) and it was because whatever he was about to do was exactly what I wanted while also scaring the hell out of me that I folded my arms and said, 'I'll have to take this all under advisement.' I knew immediately that I'd sounded sarcastic, and I did nothing to correct the impression."

The novel's first six or seven chapters function as fully independant short stories, which led me to believe that I was actually reading a story cycle, in the tradition of "Lives of Girls and Women" and "Funny Boy." The final chapter, though, is a sprawling, 118 page climax and denouement that doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the book's structure and concludes with Lee's rather quick and predictable discovery that "the world [is] so big!" It's disappointing, partly because of it's predictability, but mainly because of it's suddeness. It feels tacked on. Also, I find it almost impossible to believe that Lee could be as poor a student as Sittenfeld describes her as being. Depressed and uninspired, sure. Overwhelmed and intimidated by the academic expectations at Ault, definitely. But surely an observant and introverted teenaged girl who (as Sittenfeld at the very least implies) is meant to become a writer would write an interesting story or be impressed by a particular novel in English class.

"Prep" was nominated for the UK's Orange Prize and was selected by the New York Times as one of The Best Books of 2005. It's a damned good novel and, while flawed, perhaps in the same league as "The Catcher in the Rye," "A Separate Peace," and Kazuo Ishiguro's recent "Never Let Me Go"-- all masterpieces of the boarding school genre. "Prep" is without a doubt one of the best books I've read in a while, and Sittenfeld's voice is an exciting new discovery. That said, I didn't feel as blown away reading it as I did reading "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl last year, or "The Little Friend" by Donna Tartt the year before.