A class act

Author skillfully details adolescent angst

Amy L. Stoll, Special to the News

Published January 7, 2005 at midnight

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The list of writers who have attempted to capture the angst of teens at prep school includes J.D. Salinger, John Knowles and, more recently, Tobias Wolff. Now an impressive new talent joins this distinguished roster.

Avoiding overextended melodrama along with obvious clichés in her whole-hearted, raw, and impressive first novel, Curtis Sittenfeld unleashes a pure, unrefined narrative on the transcendental experiences of adolescence. With Prep, Sittenfeld offers up a genuine and often heart-wrenching story.

Captured through the eyes of Lee Fiora, Prep traces her four year journey at The Ault School, a coed preparatory school in Massachusetts. Although Ault is a fictionalized school, the perils, loves, anxieties, daily dreads and fears of insignificance are recognizably authentic.

Hailing from a small Midwestern town, Lee finds herself a stranger upon her arrival to Ault. Not only is she not from New England, Lee also fits the category of what Ault students refer to as "LMC": Lower Middle Class.

Freshman year begins with a rocky start, as Lee tries to adjust to her mysterious environment. Through painful trial and error, she learns quickly what is acceptable and not - what is discussed and what is off-limits. Lee spends the majority of her time eavesdropping on conversations and studying her peers in hopes of figuring out where she fits in the larger equation.

"At the time," Lee narrates in one passage, "it surprised me how openly Martha referred to the Maxwells' money, and later, when I went to Martha's family's house in Vermont the first time, it surprised me to see that they, too, clearly were wealthy. But there were different kinds of rich, I eventually realized. There was normal rich, dignified rich, which you didn't talk about, and then there was extreme, comical, unsubtle rich - like having your dorm room professionally decorated, or riding a limousine into Boston to meet your mother - and that was permissible to discuss."

After a caustic episode in Ancient History class, Lee has a chance encounter with the beautiful senior prefect, Gates Medkowski. Shocked that talking with Gates comes so natural, Lee's imagination takes flight and spurs a multitude of daydreams in which she and Gates become real chums.

Outside of superficial conversations with her roommates, though, Lee's interactions with her peers are so happenstance that she spends many of her waking hours rehearsing possible conversations and examining past yearbooks for clues to understanding the superlative Ault student.

Then, as part of an annual Ault tradition, the students receive a "surprise holiday," where classes are cancelled for the day and students are free to daytrip off campus. For lack of any other invitations, Lee ventures alone to the nearby mall. Acting on impulse, she decides to get her ears pierced and ends up fainting on the store floor.

Like a knight in shining armor, Cross Sugarman, one of the most popular boys in her class, comes to her rescue and helps her to her feet. After a quick lunch and a taxi drive home with Cross and a few of his classmates, Lee finds herself playing and rewinding a mental tape of future possible scenarios between her and Cross.

Keeping her encounter with Cross from her roommates, Lee finds herself increasingly attracted to his good manner and boyish charm. Over the next few semesters, however, few interactions occur between her and "Sug," and the chances of any future relationship seem to dwindle - until a fortuitous request for a haircut sets off a chain of events that leads Lee further down the road of acceptance and significance.

Prep flows like an extended diary entry, and Sittenfeld's brilliant writing sparkles in each turn, hitting the bitter isolation of adolescence spot-on.

In one scene, for instance, where Lee runs into previous freshman roommate Dede and winds up in a heated conversation about the upcoming race for senior prefect, Sittenfeld writes:

"Dede smiled a little tiny smile, and I felt like slapping her. Our antagonism had always contained a certain sisterly intimacy; once, during freshman year, when we'd been standing face-to-face arguing, Dede had reached out and actually pulled my hair, and the sheer immaturity of the gesture had made me burst out laughing. She'd said, almost shyly, 'What? What?' but she'd started laughing, too, and then we hadn't been able to continue fighting. Dede and I were each other's opposites, I sometimes thought, and therefore uncomfortably similar - she faked enthusiasm, and I faked indifference; she glommed on to people like Aspeth Montgomery and Cross Sugarman, and I made a point of not speaking to them from one semester to the next."

Sometimes painful, but always remarkably genuine, each page leaves you with the internal tingle of having to live through someone else's bouts of humiliation. In turning these pages, one cannot help but think that Sittenfeld experienced similar situations and found herself in the flux of acute emotions.

Near the end of the novel, Sittenfeld's writing becomes increasingly poignant, and some situations feel so real, that the reader is desperate to look away and continue reading, at the same time.

Whether you are of the prep school or public high school variety, Sittenfeld's novel will conjure memories of happiness, regret and embarrassment. No matter if high school was the best or worst time of your life, Prep will have you reaching for your own yearbook.

Amy L. Stoll is a freelance writer living in Superior.

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