The book I read over the weekend was Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. I have a mixed opinion of this one. The basic storyline is that Lee Fiora, a lower middle-class girl from Indiana, wins a scholarship to attend Ault School, an elite and prestigious Massachusetts boarding school. The novel follows Lee and her classmates through their four years at Ault.
Positives: Sittenfeld is great at character development. Even though some of the supporting cast is stereotypical (the handsome athlete, the prima donna, the desperate/clingy girl who tries too hard), they are very well written and empathetic. She does a good job of making me care about what happened to the characters, even the less likeable ones; I was anxious to see how everyone and everything turned out. The writing was very convincing and seemed, to someone who has never attended boarding school, to present a very real picture of that experience. Some anecdotes are funny, others are poignant.
Negatives: I grew to truly despise the protagonist, Lee. While it was refreshing to see a lead character depicted "warts and all", and at first I was interested to see how Lee coped with being an outsider/underdog, her incessant whining and constant disagreeable manner got old after, oh, the first 300 pages. I'm stealing this phrase from a reviewer on Amazon because it's so spot-on: Lee's outlook was so "utterly and unremittingly bleak" that it was unrealistic, even for an angsty teenager. Moreover, it was so annoying that I found myself hoping she'd become the one Ault suicide statistic. And why the hell not, she hates EVERYTHING. She's supposed to be so academically gifted that she's landed a scholarship to this great school, where the student-teacher ratio is 12-1, but she apparently loathes (and stinks at) all subjects equally. She doesn't enjoy any of her schoolwork - and how realistic is that? She doesn't discover a love of languages, an appreciation for the arts, a wonder at the discoveries of science, an interest in history, NOTHING?!? I could not picture someone so gifted in academia that she wins a scholarship to a private prep school finding every. single. subject. so completely and totally repellant. Furthermore, she hates the social aspects of boarding school and avoids them whenever possible, sometimes with elaborate planning and strategy. It's not so much that she doesn't fit in (has there ever been anyone who attended high school who can't relate to that one?) - it's more that she's decided she won't fit in, is determined not to be proven wrong and to that end will refuse to enjoy anything. Oh, and lest we forget, she is abysmal at sports so she hates those, too.
I can be far too picky, I know, but there were a couple of things that didn't make sense which detracted from my enjoyment of the novel. Aside from Lee's urge-to-KOS-inspiring personality, there was the emphasis placed on her having won a scholarship. Every scholarship I've ever heard of, even need-based ones, require certain academic standards, but she never mentions this, never seems to worry about her half-assed, inattentive performance resulting in a revocation of her scholarship. At no point did it ever seem to occur to her that, anger at Ms. Van der Hoef and scorn for Ms. Moray aside, she might want to try to do a good job on one or two assignments. This just didn't ring true. She worries ad nauseam about damn-near everything else, such as the discovery of her non-existent diary, so why is she never worried about losing her scholarship? How can her parents afford the $4000 per annum her scholarship doesn't cover when her dad is driving around in a POS Datsun? Okay, I'd buy that the parents don't trade up for a newer car in order to keep her at prep school, except they haven't made Datsuns since, what, 1980? (It's present day, they have CD players and PCs). Ma and Pa Fiora have been scraping the bottom of the barrel long before Lee made it to prep school, apparently. Another issue was that we're told repeatedly that there are boys' dorms and girls' dorms, four of each, and often told in which dorm a character resides. Yet one of the funniest portions of the story relies upon a male character (McGrath Mills)'s room being located directly underneath "Heidi and Alexis" - this bugged me - are they coed dorms or not? Why is each of the 8 housing buildings either a boys' dorm or a girls' dorm if McGrath lives one floor below Heidi? I don't know why this irked me as much as it did - maybe because it smacks of sloppiness in an otherwise very un-sloppy piece of writing.
Verdict: entertaining throughout, interesting through the first half or so, but eventually the protagonist's complete negativity turn her into a truly unlikeable character. Overall and throughout, I got the feeling that Sittenfeld wanted readers to discover something profound in the subtext, but I'm damned if I know what it was.
Positives: Sittenfeld is great at character development. Even though some of the supporting cast is stereotypical (the handsome athlete, the prima donna, the desperate/clingy girl who tries too hard), they are very well written and empathetic. She does a good job of making me care about what happened to the characters, even the less likeable ones; I was anxious to see how everyone and everything turned out. The writing was very convincing and seemed, to someone who has never attended boarding school, to present a very real picture of that experience. Some anecdotes are funny, others are poignant.
Negatives: I grew to truly despise the protagonist, Lee. While it was refreshing to see a lead character depicted "warts and all", and at first I was interested to see how Lee coped with being an outsider/underdog, her incessant whining and constant disagreeable manner got old after, oh, the first 300 pages. I'm stealing this phrase from a reviewer on Amazon because it's so spot-on: Lee's outlook was so "utterly and unremittingly bleak" that it was unrealistic, even for an angsty teenager. Moreover, it was so annoying that I found myself hoping she'd become the one Ault suicide statistic. And why the hell not, she hates EVERYTHING. She's supposed to be so academically gifted that she's landed a scholarship to this great school, where the student-teacher ratio is 12-1, but she apparently loathes (and stinks at) all subjects equally. She doesn't enjoy any of her schoolwork - and how realistic is that? She doesn't discover a love of languages, an appreciation for the arts, a wonder at the discoveries of science, an interest in history, NOTHING?!? I could not picture someone so gifted in academia that she wins a scholarship to a private prep school finding every. single. subject. so completely and totally repellant. Furthermore, she hates the social aspects of boarding school and avoids them whenever possible, sometimes with elaborate planning and strategy. It's not so much that she doesn't fit in (has there ever been anyone who attended high school who can't relate to that one?) - it's more that she's decided she won't fit in, is determined not to be proven wrong and to that end will refuse to enjoy anything. Oh, and lest we forget, she is abysmal at sports so she hates those, too.
I can be far too picky, I know, but there were a couple of things that didn't make sense which detracted from my enjoyment of the novel. Aside from Lee's urge-to-KOS-inspiring personality, there was the emphasis placed on her having won a scholarship. Every scholarship I've ever heard of, even need-based ones, require certain academic standards, but she never mentions this, never seems to worry about her half-assed, inattentive performance resulting in a revocation of her scholarship. At no point did it ever seem to occur to her that, anger at Ms. Van der Hoef and scorn for Ms. Moray aside, she might want to try to do a good job on one or two assignments. This just didn't ring true. She worries ad nauseam about damn-near everything else, such as the discovery of her non-existent diary, so why is she never worried about losing her scholarship? How can her parents afford the $4000 per annum her scholarship doesn't cover when her dad is driving around in a POS Datsun? Okay, I'd buy that the parents don't trade up for a newer car in order to keep her at prep school, except they haven't made Datsuns since, what, 1980? (It's present day, they have CD players and PCs). Ma and Pa Fiora have been scraping the bottom of the barrel long before Lee made it to prep school, apparently. Another issue was that we're told repeatedly that there are boys' dorms and girls' dorms, four of each, and often told in which dorm a character resides. Yet one of the funniest portions of the story relies upon a male character (McGrath Mills)'s room being located directly underneath "Heidi and Alexis" - this bugged me - are they coed dorms or not? Why is each of the 8 housing buildings either a boys' dorm or a girls' dorm if McGrath lives one floor below Heidi? I don't know why this irked me as much as it did - maybe because it smacks of sloppiness in an otherwise very un-sloppy piece of writing.
Verdict: entertaining throughout, interesting through the first half or so, but eventually the protagonist's complete negativity turn her into a truly unlikeable character. Overall and throughout, I got the feeling that Sittenfeld wanted readers to discover something profound in the subtext, but I'm damned if I know what it was.
2 Comments:
I enjoyed this review because I actually read the book. I'm envious of how much you've been reading lately! I agree with both your positive and negative assessments. I think I liked it more than you did because I was so engaged in the story and that outweighed my dislike of the main character. And I didn't loathe her, but I found it hard to sympathize with her. It was actually interesting to read how someone thinks who thinks so differently from me. But I had the same reaction you did to her lack of interest in all things academic. That just didn't make sense at all.
By
Anonymous Me, at 9:45 PM
I've been wanting to read that book. I only skimmed your review, but I'll come back to it after I've read the book, so I can argue with you or something. :)
By
Anonymous, at 9:19 PM
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