Bestseller: Prep

Andover. Exeter. Deerfield. Groton. Phillips hybrids galore.

Walk around Harvard’s campus, and you will undoubtedly find throngs of students who attended New England prep schools or the Mid-Atlantic equivalent. They sit next to you in Psychology 1504, “Positive Psychology.” They stumble beside you at Friday night parties.

And they inhabit what is quite possibly the most aptly titled novel in the history of literature—“Prep” by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Thumb through the crisp pages of “Prep,” and one discovers a high school world foreign to most of the American population.

The novel follows Lee Fiora, a thoughtful and observant 14-year-old, as she traverses through the social hierarchies and bureaucratic pyramids of the fictional Ault School in Massachusetts.

What’s noteworthy about Lee is that she enters this world of bow-ties and rowing regattas ignorantly, having grown up in South Bend, Indiana and only learning of Ault through a publicity brochure. Her whimsical decision to study at Ault leads her on a “Wizard of Oz” type odyssey—one in which her Glenda never materializes and she, as Dorothy, must learn to single-handedly fight through heightened teenage trials.

Her tribulations range from hilarious awkwardness to suicide attempts, from innocent crushes to virginal sexual encounters, all tempered by Lee’s relative poverty compared to the Polo-donning preps around her.

Narrated from the perspective of a thirtysomething Lee, “Prep” fluidly vacillates between the point of view of the older and wiser and the nervous teenage version of the character. This temporal transition is so seamless, in fact, that the reader easily absorbs the adult musings without growing detached from high school Lee’s emotions.

Like J.D. Salinger before her, Sittenfeld portrays Lee’s adolescent angst as palpable and consistently believable, while guiding the reader through the colorful insight of a character who might be otherwise pegged as an awkward outsider. She wonders why she is no longer the confident 13-year-old she was in South Bend. Why has she allowed Ault to change her? She worries what her working-class parents will think when they see her acting so differently.

Sittenfeld delves past stereotypes to locate universal truths and to defy readers’ expectations. As a senior, when Lee becomes sexually involved with her long-term crush, a popular class prefect, it is not he who requests secrecy, as one might expect—it is Lee. Having fantasized about this moment for three years, Lee is surprisingly uncomfortable with the outcome. This dissatisfaction with reality seems fully human and genuine.

After making another mistake, Lee finds herself at the center of a journalistic maelstorm, after she accidentally divulges emotional secrets to an embittered New York Times reporter. No matter how hard Lee fights to remain below the obvious social fray, she is continually part of the barrage of popularity bullets.

While most of the characters are fully fleshed out, there are a few whom serve merely functional purposes, such as the New York Times reporter. Operating off simple motivations—resentment and anger at having been a prep school outcast herself—this character does not possess any real layers or depth of feeling.

But maybe Sittenfeld purposefully depicted her in this manner. After all, Lee does not identify with the reporter’s blind villainization of prep schools. On the contrary, Lee feels pangs of guilt at having unwittingly dragged Ault’s name through the journalistic mud.

For the characters of “Prep,” life does not exists in simplistic black and white type. Ault is not the villain. Lee is not a perfectly righteous heroine. Rather, the story is one of universal experience and collective evolution—filled with mistakes, ridicule, and eventual peace with oneself and others.

Who knew such a struggle could exist within hallowed, ivy-colored walls of higher learning?

Oh right, we do.

—Staff writer Kathleen A. Fedornak can be reached at kfedorn@fas.harvard.edu.

Prep
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Out Now