The cover of Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep, proudly displays a pink and green ribbon belt, which, for a pressed piece of paper, feels incredibly realistic. So too does the painfully honest narrative of Sittenfeld’s heroine Lee Fiora. Don’t be fooled by the cover’s shallow appearance. While Prep is certainly an enjoyable read, it is not fluff. Sittenfeld delivers an extremely well-written coming-of-age commentary on sexuality, race, gender and especially social privilege.
A South Bend, Indiana native, Lee decides on a whim to apply to New England boarding schools because, according to her, her public high school “had hallways of pale green linoleum and grimy lockers and stringy-haired boys who wrote the names of heavy metal bands across the backs of their denim jackets,” while boys at boarding schools held lacrosse sticks, grinned handsomely over their mouth guards and wore wool sweaters.
Surrounded by money and beauty, Lee feels like an outsider at the fictional Ault school located outside Boston. Everyone seems so perfect: her crush Cross Sugarman, her roommate Martha, senior prefect Gates Medkowski, blond popularity queen Aspeth and the endless sea of faces that fill the halls of Ault. Amidst the perfection around her, Lee loses confidence in herself. Instead, she tries not to be noticed but still feels sadly miffed when she is ignored.
Throughout the early parts of Lee’s Ault career, she spends most of her time as a loner, feeling incredibly out of place in a community of such wealthy students. She observes the exquisite and daunting world around her while shying away from real interactions. Lee’s heartrending yet witty account leads the reader through the adolescent maze of money, peers, family, sex and academics found in America’s boarding schools. But many Duke boarding school veterans said the book’s fictional school was both realistic and exaggerated.
Sophomore Fiona Reeves definitely agrees with some of Lee’s observations about Ault. Reeves attended The Peddie School in New Jersey, where students are definitely quite rich. The only ones who aren’t wealthy are on scholarship or are the children of Peddie’s teachers, janitors, kitchen staff, etc. and were allowed to attend for free. But according to Reeves, you wouldn’t be able to tell that unless you knew them.
“If you’re on scholarship, you try hard to make it look like you’re not,” she said. “There was a lot of pressure to have a Coach bag and other material items.”
While Lee observes that almost everyone at Ault was beautiful, Reeves did not find the same to be true at Peddie. “People did not seem effortlessly perfect. There were definitely a lot of unattractive people. Everyone seemed rich, but not perfect.”
Sophomore Maggie Smythe, who attended The Taft School in Connecticut, really enjoyed the references Prep makes to unique boarding school traditions. She remembers fondly her school’s version of surprise holiday, when the Dean gives the students a random vacation day; roll call, when the whole student body meets for daily announcements; inter-dorm visitation rules; the gossip section in the student newspaper and playing pranks on friends.
While Taft students that are not on financial aid are certainly wealthy, Smythe feels that there was not a lot of material pressure. “When we weren’t in class or at sit-down dinner [when they had a dress code to follow] people usually wore sweatpants or pajamas.” As a matter of fact, Smythe said she feels that wealth is as much, if not more, visible at Duke than at Taft.
While the inspiration for the novel certainly stemmed from Sittenfeld’s boarding school experience—she attended Groton, just outside Boston—much of the story, including Lee, is her invention. “Of course I borrowed some things from real life, but I changed them to make them more dramatic, interesting and orderly,” Sittenfeld said. “Real life tends to be fairly messy.”
The motivation for writing the novel stemmed from a desire to realistically depict a particular subculture, not to attack life at boarding schools. Speaking about social pressure, Sittenfeld commented, “I think there’s pressure to conform in most high schools, including boarding schools. Boarding schools and typical public schools seem to have more in common than not.”
Prep is currently at No. 9 on The New York Times bestseller list, and the book has been on the list for three weeks. Sittenfeld attributes some of Prep’s success to the fact that “a lot of people have a prurient interest in both wealth and youth, and boarding school is one setting where the two intersect.”
While Sittenfeld certainly did not anticipate such success, she believes readers are responding to the fact that the book has “a soul.”
“Although I’m not Lee, I think I wrote in a sincere way and tried to depict life honestly instead of trying to seem like a clever person who can do wacky tricks with language,” Sittenfeld said.
This honesty definitely comes through when reading the novel. Whether it is true to boarding-school life may depend on the reader’s personal opinion, but it is definitely true to the human experience. This book is a well written account of serious issues. Although Prep takes place at a fictional boarding school, it is still relevant to many people’s experiences here at Duke.
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