Prep

Another helping of Curtis Sittenfeld after American Wife. Prep is actually Sittenfeld's first novel, and it received mixed reviews - while it was applauded for its strong detail and narration, others criticized it for its weak plot. As I was taken through the life of an ordinary teenage girl in Ault, a prestigious and competitive boarding school near Boston, I was over and over again struck by a number of convincing dialogues (or monologues, rather) - they echoed certain encounters and thoughts of my own so vividly that the experience was almost creepy. I have noted down in here some quotes from the book that have touched a chord; given that they have been quoted out of context, there is a chance they do not appear as persuasive as in the story itself.

Notwithstanding that Prep may be light on plot, it is a truthful, if not cruel, account of issues arising from class, race, sex, family and people that a young girl has to handle in a privileged yet possibly suffocating environment. A word of advice to local parents therefore: before rushing to queue for a place for your child at Harrow School in Tuen Mun, read Prep - at least you'd know what the huge bills may be paying for, and what your child may be learning other than pretentiousness.

* * *

"I was worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely."

"I'd researched boarding schools at the public library and written away for catalogs myself. Their glossy pages showed photographs of teenagers in wool sweaters singing hymns in the chapel, gripping lacrosse sticks, intently regarding a math equation written across the chalkboard. I had traded away my family for this glossiness."

"I imagined that if I left South Blend, I would meet a melancholy, athletic boy who liked to read as much as I did and on overcast Sundays we would take walks together wearing wool sweaters."

"If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you when the teacher think you're one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one."

"I think, looking back, that this was the single best thing about Ault, the sense of possibility."

"It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious..."

"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 lest you taint the previous interaction."

"Of course, now I wonder where I had gotten the idea that for you to participate in a gathering, the other people had to really, really want you to be there and that anything short of rabid enthusiasm on their part meant you'd be a nuisance. Where had I gotten the idea that being a nuisance was that big a deal?"

"I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people - for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling."

"But making a lot of money didn't seem like something I'd be able to control; I'd gotten as far as Ault, but I wasn't sure I'd get any further. I wasn't smart or disciplined the way those kids were, I wasn't driven. Presumably, I'd always be aware of lives like these without living one; I couldn't confuse familiarity with entitlement."

"I hated them [family] because they thought I was the same as they were, because if they were right, it would mean I'd failed myself, and because if they were wrong, it would mean I had betrayed them."

"Later, after Ault, I reinvented myself - not overnight but little by little. Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self-depracation, humor, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm."

"I've never since Ault been in a place where everyone wants the same things; minus a universal currency, it's not always clear to me what I myself want. And anyway, no one's watching to see whether or not you get what you're after -- if at Ault I'd felt mostly unnoticed, I'd also, at certain moments, felt scrutinized. After Ault, I was unaccounted for."

-- Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep