"I'd pretended it was about academics, but it never had been. Despite what Lee tells her family, her desire to attend Ault has little to do with the three R's, and everything to do with the prospect of canoodling with a Weejun-wearing laddie. While Lee is obviously bright, her parents are confused as to why she'd want to leave Indiana, and her perfectly acceptable local high school, for an expensive private school on the East Coast. It is Lee's observations of what it's like to be a scholarship student thrust into a world of privilege that shape the novel.
Sittenfeld's heroine, Lee Fiora (while certainly classifiable as an alienated adolescent), possesses a Midwesterner's level head and a gimlet eye for all things top-drawer.
But unlike "A Separate Peace," "Prep" doesn't heave with poetic angst. John Knowles wrote the seminal American boarding school bildungsroman, "A Separate Peace" (1960), which drew heavily on his own experience at Phillips Exeter, and gave rise to an entire class of coming-of-age at sleep-away-school books. After all, who but the affluent and flamboyantly well bred would dare saddle a child with names such as Tab or Aspeth, which sounds all too much like a lisped pronunciation of "aspic."
Not the repressive, secret-society-driven hothouse captured in "Dead Poets Society," but life in your typical, sunny, everyday New England boarding school.Ĭurtis Sittenfeld's debut novel, "Prep," is a four-year, semester-by-semester tour of Ault, a fictional private boarding school in Massachusetts that's populated with boys and girls in khakis and blue blazers whose names alone identify them as spawn of the prosperous. What isn't as widely known is what actual life is like behind the hushed, ivy-armored walls of America's elite prep schools. Seemingly bathed in a golden light of good fortune, the wealthy keep pieds-à- terre, have trust funds that rival the gross national product of tiny African nations and, of course, are educated at the finest, most upper-crust prep schools.
0 kommentar(er)
