Back to School 4: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

To round out our series on high school novels we're jumping across the pond (aka the Atlantic Ocean) and skipping several decades to find ourselves in early 1990s Massachusetts. Welcome to the world of East Coast preppy culture, where Laura Ashley dresses, LL Bean canvas tote bags, goldfish crackers, classic rock, pink shorts and ties with whales on them, reign supreme.

As with the other three school stories we’ve covered so far, the ultra-elite East Coast boarding school of Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2005 novel Prep is a microcosm of the nation at large - or at least a decent segment of it. Prep is set in the class-conscious world of New England and the boarding schools that are meant to produce the graduates of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Sittenfeld, who, like her heroine Lee is from the Midwest, picks up the milieu of The Great Gatsby half a century later, and makes the characters are ten years younger. Picture Daisy and Tm Buchanan, Jordan Baker and Nick Caraway in high school, wondering if they should use a different deodorant, and whether they have the right haircut.

Prep was The Secret History of American boarding school stories when it came out, an authentic glimpse into what really went on in these ultra privileged high school campuses. Curtis Sittenfeld would take on other iconic American stories in subsequent novels, rewriting the worlds of First Lady Laura Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton. With Prep she trained her excruciatingly detailed outsider-observer’s eye on the rituals, mores and social markers of America’s white elites.

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