The heartaches of adolescence often fade with adulthood. Time has a way of making the unrequited crushes, the measures taken to fit in (or at least not stand out), and the panicked moments when no spot in the cafeteria looks hospitable seem almost amusing, like embarrassments that happened to someone else a long time ago. Curtis Sittenfeld knows better. With her debut novel Prep, she plunges protagonist Lee Fiora, a middle-class kid from South Bend, Indiana, into an environment seemingly designed to amplify her already well-developed teen discomfort: an exclusive East Coast co-ed boarding school named Ault. From there, Sittenfeld not only refuses to look away, she declines to dismiss any of the novel's drama as youthful folly. Narrating the events from the distance of a few years, Lee seems not to have forgotten a single detail, and knows better than to think those details don't matter anymore.
Following Lee's progress from the dorm-room anxieties of her freshman fall semester to graduation–when those anxieties haven't so much dissipated as taken on new forms–the episodic Prep touches both on familiar adolescent woes and on tensions unique to Lee's situation. Sittenfeld's heroine struggles with her studies and worries about her social standing, but for her, both woes are tied to money, and the great unspoken financial gulf separating her from her classmates. A slipup in math class might mean the end of her tenure. One social faux pas too many could end her in other ways.
Sittenfeld never depicts the struggle in simple snobs-vs.-slobs terms, however, and the ambiguity gives the novel an extra charge. When a classmate advises Lee against dating a young cafeteria worker from town because of the social consequences, the awfulness of what she says is undercut by the genuine concern behind it. In the bravura, novella-length closing chapter, Sittenfeld depicts Lee's yearlong affair with another student who wants to embrace her in private while keeping her at arm's length in public. It sounds like the behavior of a cad, and it is, but behaving carelessly doesn't mean someone doesn't care, as the story goes on to reveal. For Lee, coming of age means discovering that with love, sex, money, and status, nothing's as simple as it first appears. Sometimes it's better, sometimes worse, but it's always complicated. Plunging her protagonist into the heart of those complications, Sittenfeld drags her out the other side wounded, but ready to face the world.