Prep: A Novel

Curtis Sittenfeld

A few words of warning: This is not a comforting boarding-school novel. There’s no season of glorious mischief, no romantic vindication, no scene where our heroine finally belongs to the place she has chosen. Instead, it’s a visceral reminder of the experience of adolescence and a glimpse of life at an elite boarding school.

This is the story of Lee Fiora, a fourteen-year-old student at a boarding school in Massachusetts. The school is fictional, but it may as well be Groton or St. Paul’s or Deerfield Academy. Picture mahogany panels engraved with every graduate’s name since the 19th century. Velvety green lawns. Granite benches. Young people sitting in the kind of afternoon light that hits just so. Everything oozes ‘old money’ and ‘legacy admission.’

But our Lee is no legacy. She’s from South Bend, Indiana; her father sells mattresses. On her own, Lee researched boarding schools, completed her application, and won a scholarship. Her parents — bewildered and proud — put her on a plane.

The novel follows her for four years via eight chapters, each indicating the passage of milestones in a student’s life: freshman fall, parents’ weekend, spring cleaning. We mostly experience it all through her youthful perspective, with occasional bits of editorial from a grown-up Lee.

Lee is innately observant and insightful — a watcher. And while it may be mostly a defense pattern, it really works here. She’s a lousy student, ‘so un-outstanding,’ as she put it.

She observes her two freshman year roommates: Sin-Jun, a Korean girl who becomes another kind of outsider, and Dede, who lays out her clothes on the dorm floor every night in the shape of a body. She also watches Aspeth Montgomery, the pretty, popular girl who invented ‘LMC’ as shorthand for classmates who dress lower-middle-class. She watches Martha Porter, who becomes her closest friend. And she watches the boys — from a distance that eventually closes. Kind of.

Underneath all of it, thought not very far underneath, is the class system. Money isn’t discussed directly at Ault; that would be gauche. Lee keeps her scholarship a secret for four years, even from her best friends. She has discerned how to spot which of her classmates are also on scholarship by looking at their rooms: Do they have stereos, or silver picture frames, or flowered bedspreads? She learns, along with everything else, that being on scholarship is bad, being unhappy is worse, and admitting to either is the worst of all.

The author Curtis Sittenfeld, herself a scholarship kid at Groton, is adept at recreating the texture of adolescence and the differences that emerge between freshman and senior year. Each rite of passage gets its due. She captures on the page the keen feelings of adolescence verging on almost-adulthood. Messy and amazing and wild. And sometimes so, so boring. The sense that there’s a game everyone else already knows how to play, if only someone would explain it.

So, don’t expect a triumphant ugly-duckling-to-swan transformation, or a just-in-the-nick-of academic triumph. Instead relish the story of a girl paying attention to everything, missing nothing, and slowly being worn down by what she sees.

I was standing in front of the stove in my pajamas, heating up chicken noodle soup, when Tullis Haskell appeared in the common room. It was a little after nine on Saturday night, and everyone else in the dorm—just about everyone else on campus, in fact—was at the first dance of the school year. While Martha had been getting dressed, fastening her bracelet, applying lip gloss, I’d sat at my desk talking to her. The fact that she hadn’t tried to convince me to go had made me feel a tiny drop of disappointment but mostly a great flood of relief, a sense that finally at Ault I’d made a friend who understood me. After Martha had left, I’d listened as the sounds of the dorm—running water and radios and other girls’ voices—became quieter, then stopped entirely. Then I’d changed into the bottoms of my pale blue cotton pajamas and an old T-shirt, gone downstairs to the common room, flicked on the TV, and dumped the contents of the soup can into a pan. It wasn’t bad to spend a Saturday night by myself. Really, it was all a matter of expectations, and in my second year at Ault, I knew not to expect much. As a freshman, I had at times believed that if my sadness were intense enough, it would magnetically draw a handsome boy to my room to comfort me, and that had served as an incentive, when alone, to lie around and weep. But nothing had ever come of my exertions, and I’d finally realized that time passed faster if you were doing something, like watching TV or reading a magazine. Besides, my nebulous wish for a boy had narrowed to a specific wish for Cross Sugarman, and he would be at the dance, and if I writhed and wailed and chanted his name, he’d still be at the dance. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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