It has been a long time since my last book review. The subject of the last was James Frey’s ‘non’-memoir, which was bashed to a million pieces in America’s openly Oprah-rific forum. Looking back years later, I still don’t feel like a helpless victim of Frey’s treacherous memoir con. That’s probably because I find as much truth in fiction as in reality, so am not that fussed about mixing the two. Anyhow, enough with the passé Frey defense, this is about ‘Prep’.
I first picked up ‘Prep’ a few months ago, but I did not choose to read it until this past week as I traveled to visit my father back home. From its opening line, ‘Prep’ hooks into the shreds of high school trauma still left inside you and cinches them out one by one for re-examination. I spent the latter hours of my journey captivated by the novel. Uncannily, when I arrived at my father’s, my high school yearbook, which I haven’t seen in at least a decade, was lying on the coffee table, unearthed during his recent move.
‘Prep’ is narrated in the first person by Lee Fiora (who, by the way, should have been cool just because of her kick-ass name), who applies and enrolls herself into boarding school at fourteen. The messy details of her four years at “Ault” remind you why even your most loathed enemies should never have to go through high school again. The only more brutal form of torture that comes to mind right now is that ball-breaker scene in Casino Royale, but I digress.
The title of the book caught my eye immediately since I went to a college preparatory school for 7 years that was literally (and perhaps a bit unimaginatively) called “Prep”. It was a day school, though, rather than a boarding school. My “boarding school” days were the subsequent four years of college for which I was ironically not prepared for at all. As you can imagine, Sittenfeld’s debut novel dug up queasy memories of my personal 11 year nightmare and was an unexpected exhumation of the awkward, acne-d adolescent self that I’d interred long ago.
Just as Lee does at Ault, I felt like an outsider all throughout high school, and after that, all throughout college. Never quite fit in anywhere, and always aware of it. Sittenfeld drums up these feelings well in her first person portrayal of Lee. The daily self-immolation through embarrassment, shame, confusion, or insecurity (often in rotation) burning in your cheeks. The hyper-self-awareness of how “being cool” was always just out of your reach. The trying on of outfits and facades and characters to see if any fit. Through all this mental distillation, the essence of who you are hardens, crystallizes, and burrows deep inside you, to be mined years later when you are finally ready to appreciate its value.
As much as the details of Lee’s narrative strike dissonant chords, the perspective from which she narrates wrenches even deeper. Sittenfeld not only chooses the first person, but a retrospective first person as well, as if Lee is re-telling the story a decade later. At once you are not simply back in high school, but you are in your late twenties, shoveling knee-deep in the graveyard of past personas. “Don’t go there,” the townsfolk cry! Sittenfeld’s narrative is tinged with an aged bitterness that bleeds off the pages, and you can’t help but squint at your own mordant memories through her vinegar fumes.
Some look back fondly on the yesteryears of young adulthood. I am not one of these people, and clearly, neither is Curtis/Lee. I’d like to think that I’ve moved completely past the bitterness of then and am able to look positively upon those years as the ‘preparatory’ period for who I am now, or better yet, for recognizing who I have always been. After all, surely the phases define the journey. But even so, as I dusted off my old yearbook and thumbed through its glossy pages, the familiar twinge that returned in my gut was a bit sharper than I’d like to admit. Funny, that of all the personas, the outsider is the hardest to decompose.
