Prep Book

Well...
This book isn't getting five stars because I thought it was a literary masterpiece. It's getting them because it's the first boarding school narrative I've read (ever) that is indicative of the actual experience, or at least my actual experience. Other books (fiction) on the subject, such as Black Ice or Oh the Glory of it All, tend to stick to one of two slants: 1) the narrator is from a poor family, gets a scholarship, and his/her has a wonderful life from boarding school on, filled with rich experiences and admittance to Harvard, and never goes back to the ghetto; 2) the narrator is from an extremely wealthy and extremely fucked-up family, escapes to boarding school, where s/he becomes vastly more fucked up, frolicking with the other rich, debauched fuckups, with the superevil family lurking in the background of each page. Prep didn't follow any of these, and admittedly, I liked it so much because it mirrored my experience.
But that's not why while reading it on a flight across the continent; somewhere above Colorado I looked up and realized I was crying. Hard. What made me cry was the memory of some of the feelings that Sittenfield describes, things that are so acute and so very particular to being away from home, in that environment, at that age. Some quotes:

"How was I supposed to understand, when I applied at the age of thirteen, that you have your whole life to leave your family? Or maybe it was going to Ault that had turned me into the kind of person who would always, for reasons of schooling, then work, stay away."

"When you go to boarding school, you're always leaving your family, not once but over and over and over, and it's not like it is when you're in college because you're older then and you're sort of supposed to be gone from them. I cried because of how guilty I felt, and because of how indulgent my guilt was...I missed them so much I was tempted to call my mother and ask her to come wait with me for the plane; she'd have done it. But then she'd know what she'd probably only suspected -- how messed up I really was, how much I'd been misleading them for the last four years. It would be much better...back on campus. But while I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgement on all our parts."


"This was what the rest of the world was like...Hardly ever did it matter if you brushed your hair before driving to the grocery store, rarely did you work in an office where you cared what more than two or three people thought of you. At Ault, caring about everything was draining, but it was also exhilarating."

"No crush is worse than a boarding school crush; college is bigger and more diluted, and in the office, at least you get a break from each other at night."


"Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self deprecation, humour, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm. Also, Ault had been the toughest audience I'd ever encounter, to the extent that sometimes afterward, I found winning people over disappointingly easy."