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April 05, 2005

Book Bites #10

I don’t usually read books while they’re still on the bestseller lists. Chalk it up to a perverse skepticism. Also, there’s something about checking out “the latest big thing” that makes me feel insignificant and hopelessly temporal. But I picked up Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep—my husband and I read it back-to-back—and I absolutely love it. It deserves every ounce of its surprising success, and it gives me hope in the ability of good writing to rise to the top.

It’s set, of course, at a fictional prep school, but the fascination of finding yourself immersed in an elitist and alien culture is just one of the book’s pleasures. The telling of “Prep” seems perfectly straightforward—the first-person narrator, Lee Fiora, simply progresses from freshman year through senior, in a series of ordinary high school events. But Lee’s insecurities are so precisely detailed that a flashbulb moment of “yes! This is what it’s like to be a teenager” awaits you on every page. And though Lee’s inevitable reckoning with her false self-representation is far from melodramatic, it’s richly satisfying. It’s a very Tobias Wolff kind of moment, though Sittenfeld is so different from Wolff in sensibility. There are no tidy symmetries here, no overwhelming awareness of fiction’s ability to shape the mess of life into artful form. Just absolute honesty and painstaking candor. It’s fantastic.

“Prep’s” straightforward verisimilitude is so unusual that I wasn’t surprised to learn the book had a hard time finding early backers. Click here to read an excellent Washington Post interview with Sittenfeld outlining how the book caught on.

Posted by Rachel at April 5, 2005 09:31 AM

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