Friday, March 25, 2005

Prep

I hated this book. Hated it. HATED it. It was joyless and depressing and infuriating. I don’t even know why I finished it except I kept hoping Lee would pull her head out of her ass and make me understand why people I did like – namely her father and Martha- liked her. I hated Lee Fiora. She may well be the most selfish, whining and whinging, self-absorbed, spineless, and pathologically neurotic protagonist I have ever come across. She had not one iota of charm or likeability. If she really was a nice, normal, cheerful, noisy teenager back in South Bend, I don’t believe it. And if I was her family, or her best friend Martha, or even her math tutor Aubrey – all of whom were at least interesting and three-dimensional people – I would never have put up with her. I don’t know why they did – we never discover one redeeming quality this horrible, shallow girl might possess.

And if this is what Curtis Sittenfeld experienced at school, I personally would have been ashamed to write about myself being such an inept, ineffectual loser. (I also don’t think she’s any great shakes as a writer – she’s not *bad* and I admit that perhaps she is suffering from comparison with another first book I just read, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which also deals with a misfit teenage girl who is at least *trying* to find her place. Not that a congratulatory cover blurb from the over-rated Dave Eggers carries any great weight with me to start…).

I was certainly no Miss Popularity in high school, but I made some friends and was, while not self-possessed or assured by any means, at least able to learn to be comfortable enough in my own skin to have some fun sometimes. Lee is truly in need of serious psychiatric treatment, I think. And that’s what pissed me off the most – her complete lack of self-preservation. If she was so unhappy, if she was so depressed and such a misfit, why stay? I wanted to yell along with her father at the end when he tells her that the past 4 years have been a lie. Is it THAT horrible to go to a public high school? Especially since she turns out to be a mediocre student at best? I could go on and on all day. I haven’t hated a book this much, or been so disgusted with a character or her author, in a very long time. Mostly, I just want to say to Lee (and to Sittenfeld): GROW UP.

2 comments:

BabelBabe said...

I was thinking of prep school books that didn't infuriate me and dealt with some of those class issues Sittenfeld tried to address - other than The Little Princess, I mean : )

A Separate Peace? It's been a while since I read it. I'd have to check.

Some of Robertson Davies' stuff, mostly the beginnings of The Cunning Man.

Definitely Beth Gutcheon's The New Girls. Which is hands down one of my all-time favorite books, definitely in my top, oooh, I would have to say, fifteen, if not ten.

Gina said...

Wow--I can't believe how differently we feel about this book. I mean, yes, there are many points in the story at which Lee needs to be slapped; I think those are the truths I was referring to. Didn't you recognize any of that insecurity or insensitivity in yourself or any of the people you knew at that age?

Take Cross for example: I knew so many girls in high school and college who subjugated themselves to charismatic boys because the attention those boys gave--even essentially in the form of what their adult selves might acknowledge as date rape--was attention those (sometimes very smart, capable, "popular") girls craved/needed for some inexplicable reason. Awful as it was, the whole Cross story rang true.

I also thought the story itself was a good example of the way people in our socitey live the lives they think they're supposed to live--whether those lives are happy or not. So many people will go to just about any lengths to be in a position to "class jump" because they think it's the key to happiness, that they ignore and squash the fact that they really would be totally happy as a baker's apprentice who lives in a studio apartment with heaps of free time for reading and hanging out.

I also liked the examples of weird communication and awkwardness between Lee and her mother.

And I loved that Lee taught Conchita to ride a bike, that Lee worried that her "crush" on Gates might maker her a lesbian, and that she seems to have grown up. College seems to have been good for her, and I'm glad.

As I said before, I agree that this book is no great literary shakes, and I agree with you that Lee isn't a sparkling hero, but I think she's someone who needs to be looked at. I think so many middle class American girls who grew up on TV and Barbie and American Girl dolls just coast through life like Lee; they live this life of expecation that things will all come together into something wonderful at some point, and they remain disengaged while they wait. And then one day it hits them that they don't really care about ANYTHING at all, and they just keep having kids and driving SUVs and overseeing the cleaning lady and spending too much time FILLING time so they don't have to think about the emptiness that the "class jumping", which was the only thing they really worked for, probably bred . . . Does that make sense? Do you see it? Or am I just a sucker who gets played by a character who's in pain, whether her pain is of her own doing or not?