Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

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.

A Sketched Presence – a fragment *20&29may07*

Today is a day of thought bubbles overcrowding the space between the outlines of my sketched presence and the bold square framing this moment of my cartoonish existence. As of late, I have had better control of these overlapping bubbles, an ability to focus the synapses into maybe five separate highways instead of twenty crossed paths, but today is just one of those interwoven days. Could be from reading a couple of very disparate perspectives this afternoon, the dizzying whirl of Kurt Vonnegut mixed with the reassuring glow of Mitch Albom. Truly an odd couple.

Vonnegut is a satirical, bumpy roadtrip where the signs are in another language and the roads angle in boomerang fashion, taking you first in this direction and sending you spinning into the opposite with no warning. Cat’s Cradle: no cat, no cradle, where the meaninglessness of life is captured within a web as simple and complicated as a cat’s cradle itself, threads twisting and repeating one upon another. For One More Day: hand upon your arm, Albom gently guides you through another rite of passage experienced by protagonists and narrators who are close, always close, to the whispered wisdom of the dying and the dead. Where the meaning of life is captured between prologue and epilogue, always found within the pages if you care to look, manifesting as graceful dancers tiptoeing across the tense tightropes that connect you to those that you love. The cynic and the optimist, and I sandwiched in between, all within the fading in and fading out of a sunny afternoon.

It has been forever since anything landed from my mind onto paper. Funny how the hours shoved aside by days and replaced by months are so hard to slow once you get into a groove. Especially when the groove is double-etched with happiness by the hand of the partner in your life, and when daily problems seem to bounce right off the protective force field that activates when Wonder Twins unite and transform into something else entirely. Thoughts swan-diving just past the edge of the blank page to be forever forgotten, crumbling on impact into ashes around the page. A kind of collateral damage that happens when there is not enough time to sit and reflect, record and translate the language of the synapses flickering a personal Morse code in your mind.

[break]

As I pick up this fragment from where I left off more than a week ago, the visual of my sketched presence surrounded by grey ashes of forgotten thoughts still lingers. More than a week has zipped by, nine days plummeting deep into the archives of my existence as I whirl around, hands desperately groping into the indigo deep, but alas, Cher’s made it more than abundantly clear that one cannot “turn back time”. Ashes are piling up around the frames. Personal life, work life, and personal life at work have formed a cat’s cradle of overlapping lines. I can only thank the myriad of gods, lords and heavens above that I have my husband’s constant bass tempering the pace of these frames reeling past. The metronome’s tick, tock, tick patiently separating one sketch from another to form some recognizable linear storyline across the projection screen.

Yesterday we began his birthday celebrations as we count down to his thirtieth in nine days time. Although some may consider the thirties to be a good pivotal age for the separation between the child and adult in us all, we are much more the type whose stubborn fists refuse to release the naiveté, the wonder, the hope and the promise of remaining just a kid. Just a kid skipping along into another decade of inspiration and experimentation. I am so looking forward to what this next volume has to offer, now that sidekicks have finally joined paths, psyched and ready to face the trail ahead. Wizards and warlocks? Alien bounty hunters and never-dying one-armed dudes called Krycek? Smurfs and Oompa Loompas? What is waiting to be sketched into the shared frames of our existence? And more importantly, do we truly have any control over the hand of the Artist? Or are we talking about frames that have already been drafted and only await the livening touch of the watercolor brush?

A or B, it really doesn’t matter, does it? Our linear perception demands our reverence to seconds ticking one after another, skipping along as you hasten to keep up. This slice of reality electrified as the watercolor spreads across the plane, overtaking the monochrome skeletal frames, opening, expanding and soaking different wavelengths into the very fabric of our souls. Whether we are choosing each color now, or have mapped them out before in a color-by-number fashion, from this limited perspective it seems to make more sense to join hands and wonder at the spectacle of colors unfolding right before our eyes, rather than firing synapses into the why’s of what has been and what is to come. Hopeful to discover the meaning in the present frame, naïve to the rigidity of frames long established, and wise enough to enjoy each stroke of color for the singular beauty it represents.