Booklog: Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld
Apr. 22nd, 2008 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaI haven't posted one of these in a long time, and I'm not sure it's a good idea to break my fast with something I so thoroughly disliked, but... well, it's rare that I've been so disappointed by a book.
Lee Fiora is a middle-class Midwestern girl who has, through luck and determination, gotten herself a scholarship at Ault School, an exclusive private East Coast boarding school. The book follows her through her four years of high school and through the course of her hopeless crush on a classmate.
I picked this one up on a recommendation I ran across on a blog. It's not the kind of book I usually go for, and, in fact, both the rec and the cover lead me to expect something rather different -- dark comedy, perhaps. Satire. A complicated and interesting web of interpersonal relationships, which I love and which seems particularly suited for a boarding school story. And I did like the first chapter.
The reason I liked the first chapter, and wanted to like the rest, was that she nailed certain feelings I have had. The one that really stands out, because I haven't seen it depicted all that often, is the feeling of wanting to be alone but not wanting it to be conspicuous that you're alone -- the subtle dance of getting to the dining hall late so that no one notices that you're eating alone, of wanting to walk, invisible and wraithlike, from one class to another without attracting even the glances of other people. It's how I was, and in many ways still am: I like the pressure of not having anyone paying attention to me, but I don't want people to know that I'm alone because then I'll have the pressure of their misguided pity or, sometimes, well-meaning but clumsy attempts to include me when I don't much want to be included. At first I thought we might have a story about that rare creature: a happy introvert, someone who, like me, enjoys asociality and quiet.
Cut for length, not for spoilers; spoilers are tagged to black-on-black, highlight to read.)
Unfortunately, Lee wasn't a happy introvert. She wasn't even exactly shy. She was just... blank. She had only one motivation (her hopeless crush on classmate Cross Sugarman), and that's it. Despite having been an excellent student before Ault School, she displayed no interest in or aptitude for academics. She had only one friend and no hobbies or interests. It wasn't that she was a thoughtful or navel-gazing character -- I can really like those. It was that she spent all of her time thinking about herself, but there was just nothing to think about. Nothing going on. Not even any interests, for god's sake. I wanted her to grow and develop in some way, but she just didn't. So the succeeding chapters dragged on and on and on, without humor or interesting characters or really anything happening. The only trajectory in the book is that of her attraction to (but not pursuit of, never anything so proactive as pursuit of) Cross Sugarman, her hopeless four-year crush -- and even that just sort of staggers along and ultimately fizzles out.
And then there was the racism, which made me want to fling the book at the wall. Every nonwhite character in the book is a stereotype, as far as I can tell. There are the Hispanic girls, whose names escape me, who wear too much makeup and revealing clothing. There's the black girl, Little Washington, who uses stereotypical speech patterns and who is later revealed to be the student thief who is stealing money out of dresser drawers. There's the Korean girl, Sin-Jun, who speaks in stereotyped broken English (and maybe, maybe that would be justifiable in the first chapter, when she's new to the country... but her English has not improved a jot by her Junior year). Oh, and did I mention the Jewish girl, Dede, who got a nose job?
There's also a puzzling scene where some of the students are doing a 'modern interpretation' skit of a great work of literature (remember those?), and their book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. Which they recast with Uncle Tom as a pimp, played by the only black guy in the class and up to the eyeballs in racist stereotyping. The teacher, who does not come from their rarified background, protests this for, you know, the obvious reasons. But the general message from that scene is that the teacher just didn't get it, that racism 'wasn't a problem' at the private boarding school, and that she was tacky for bringing it up. Perhaps the author meant to show that the characters were all narrow-minded and trapped in their self-congratulatory little bubble, but... the teacher was otherwise consistently portrayed as pathetic, and the students' interpretation is never challenged for the rest of the book. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
Then, too, the issue of sexism. Lee loves boys for being arrogant and pushy, which annoys me to start with -- but then condemns girls for being arrogant and pushy. Which, argh! Argh! Argh! There's also the undertone of 'men are so open and up-front and honest and women are all catty and secretive and nasty,' which is one of those things that I hate. Sure, women wind up using subtler forms of aggression -- but it's not because we're all backstabbing Liliths by nature; it's because we are socially trained to be oblique, and in many cases punished when overtly aggressive. Pretending that it's just that men are nicer is both disingenuous and -- well, and also, doesn't acknowledge that direct aggression can sometimes be very bad. Drives me nuts. And again, it could be that this is just Lee's immature perspective... but when Lee's immature perspective is not ever challenged in any way, that seems like a cop-out answer.
But the race-and-sexism protests serve to make the book actually sound more interesting than it is. Which isn't to say it's unqualified awful: it has moments of genuine insight, little bits that were actually funny, and the writing is not at all bad, very fluid and readable. The main problem is that it's dull, and the main character is unlikeable. I got caught up because I thought I could empathize with her -- but I couldn't; she wasn't shy like me, she was shy like me but had nothing going on under the surface, either. And it's hard for me to empathize with anyone who has no interests, drives, hobbies, or, in fact, any desires at all except for a particular boy. And that's really, really, really not what I look for when I look to read a book about a woman, young or old.
Lee Fiora is a middle-class Midwestern girl who has, through luck and determination, gotten herself a scholarship at Ault School, an exclusive private East Coast boarding school. The book follows her through her four years of high school and through the course of her hopeless crush on a classmate.
I picked this one up on a recommendation I ran across on a blog. It's not the kind of book I usually go for, and, in fact, both the rec and the cover lead me to expect something rather different -- dark comedy, perhaps. Satire. A complicated and interesting web of interpersonal relationships, which I love and which seems particularly suited for a boarding school story. And I did like the first chapter.
The reason I liked the first chapter, and wanted to like the rest, was that she nailed certain feelings I have had. The one that really stands out, because I haven't seen it depicted all that often, is the feeling of wanting to be alone but not wanting it to be conspicuous that you're alone -- the subtle dance of getting to the dining hall late so that no one notices that you're eating alone, of wanting to walk, invisible and wraithlike, from one class to another without attracting even the glances of other people. It's how I was, and in many ways still am: I like the pressure of not having anyone paying attention to me, but I don't want people to know that I'm alone because then I'll have the pressure of their misguided pity or, sometimes, well-meaning but clumsy attempts to include me when I don't much want to be included. At first I thought we might have a story about that rare creature: a happy introvert, someone who, like me, enjoys asociality and quiet.
Cut for length, not for spoilers; spoilers are tagged to black-on-black, highlight to read.)
Unfortunately, Lee wasn't a happy introvert. She wasn't even exactly shy. She was just... blank. She had only one motivation (her hopeless crush on classmate Cross Sugarman), and that's it. Despite having been an excellent student before Ault School, she displayed no interest in or aptitude for academics. She had only one friend and no hobbies or interests. It wasn't that she was a thoughtful or navel-gazing character -- I can really like those. It was that she spent all of her time thinking about herself, but there was just nothing to think about. Nothing going on. Not even any interests, for god's sake. I wanted her to grow and develop in some way, but she just didn't. So the succeeding chapters dragged on and on and on, without humor or interesting characters or really anything happening. The only trajectory in the book is that of her attraction to (but not pursuit of, never anything so proactive as pursuit of) Cross Sugarman, her hopeless four-year crush -- and even that just sort of staggers along and ultimately fizzles out.
And then there was the racism, which made me want to fling the book at the wall. Every nonwhite character in the book is a stereotype, as far as I can tell. There are the Hispanic girls, whose names escape me, who wear too much makeup and revealing clothing. There's the black girl, Little Washington, who uses stereotypical speech patterns and who is later revealed to be the student thief who is stealing money out of dresser drawers. There's the Korean girl, Sin-Jun, who speaks in stereotyped broken English (and maybe, maybe that would be justifiable in the first chapter, when she's new to the country... but her English has not improved a jot by her Junior year). Oh, and did I mention the Jewish girl, Dede, who got a nose job?
There's also a puzzling scene where some of the students are doing a 'modern interpretation' skit of a great work of literature (remember those?), and their book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. Which they recast with Uncle Tom as a pimp, played by the only black guy in the class and up to the eyeballs in racist stereotyping. The teacher, who does not come from their rarified background, protests this for, you know, the obvious reasons. But the general message from that scene is that the teacher just didn't get it, that racism 'wasn't a problem' at the private boarding school, and that she was tacky for bringing it up. Perhaps the author meant to show that the characters were all narrow-minded and trapped in their self-congratulatory little bubble, but... the teacher was otherwise consistently portrayed as pathetic, and the students' interpretation is never challenged for the rest of the book. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
Then, too, the issue of sexism. Lee loves boys for being arrogant and pushy, which annoys me to start with -- but then condemns girls for being arrogant and pushy. Which, argh! Argh! Argh! There's also the undertone of 'men are so open and up-front and honest and women are all catty and secretive and nasty,' which is one of those things that I hate. Sure, women wind up using subtler forms of aggression -- but it's not because we're all backstabbing Liliths by nature; it's because we are socially trained to be oblique, and in many cases punished when overtly aggressive. Pretending that it's just that men are nicer is both disingenuous and -- well, and also, doesn't acknowledge that direct aggression can sometimes be very bad. Drives me nuts. And again, it could be that this is just Lee's immature perspective... but when Lee's immature perspective is not ever challenged in any way, that seems like a cop-out answer.
But the race-and-sexism protests serve to make the book actually sound more interesting than it is. Which isn't to say it's unqualified awful: it has moments of genuine insight, little bits that were actually funny, and the writing is not at all bad, very fluid and readable. The main problem is that it's dull, and the main character is unlikeable. I got caught up because I thought I could empathize with her -- but I couldn't; she wasn't shy like me, she was shy like me but had nothing going on under the surface, either. And it's hard for me to empathize with anyone who has no interests, drives, hobbies, or, in fact, any desires at all except for a particular boy. And that's really, really, really not what I look for when I look to read a book about a woman, young or old.