Teenage angst and class divides

Prep

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Lee Fiora is a working class student on a scholarship in a fictional boarding school, Ault in Massachusetts. She is there because she saw a brochure of that school, saw prep school students in blazers, playing lacrosse and rowing, an OC world set in Massachusetts. Lee decides that is where she wants to spend the next 4 years of her life, away from her normal middle class home, where her mother works as a bookkeeper and her father owns a mattress shop. She gets the scholarship, convinces her bewildered parents and enters Ault, prepared to be part of that dream brochure.

Ault of course is a place where no one talks of money, but where money permeates every aspect of student life - from the choice of bedspreads in hostel rooms to the hotel parents stay when they come visiting. “The equation was that simple. Being rich, in the end, counted for the most - for more, even, than being pretty.” Lee is a misfit in class terms. She is an obviously intelligent young girl but in a world where she is forever looking back at what she sees as her own inadequate background, she never stands a chance. There is nothing in her normal mid-western teenage life that prepares her for the inadequacy she feels around her moneyed fellow students. She retreats. Into the dorm, into the library, into wherever she does not have to interact with the sociable, happening students of the school.

Written in the first person, Prep describes in sometimes excruciating detail, the inner workings of a teenage mind caught in a world that only heightens a lack of self-worth that is inherent in the age. “I always worried that someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely..” and “I wanted to have boyfriends, I wanted my life to be sorrowful and complicated and unwholesome, at least a little unwholesome.” Instead Lee is left to be ordinary, someone who is forever trying to efface herself, not drawing attention, keeping out of the way of situations that ask more of her.

But Lee watches. She herself tries to fade into the background, but her skills of observation are impeccable. She desperately wants to belong, yet she sees and understands the underbelly of privilege. She sees how desperately unhappy or needy or shallow some of the girls and boys around her are. How there are even different types of money, some more dignified than others. And how there are some universal truths to teenage life - there will be suicide attempts, failures in love, friendships made and betrayed.

Of course things do happen to Lee too. She makes a friend. She has sex. She falls in love for the first time. She learns about  the unrelenting pressure on a girl to behave a certain way for a guy. (“This was just the beginning! For years and years, there would be so many things I would do for a guy that I wouldn’t do in my usual life - jokes I wouldn’t normally tell, places I wouldn’t normally go, clothes I wouldn’t normally wear, drinks I wouldn’t normally drink, food I wouldn’t normally eat,..) Her heart is broken. She becomes famous in school for all the wrong reasons.

All through this, she maintains a sense of ‘outsider-ness’ that never ever disappears. Even as she reflects back on her years at Ault, her abiding memory is of unhappiness. Yet, as she says. “I remember myself as often unhappy at Ault, and yet my unhappiness was so alert and expectant; really, it was, in its energy, not that different from happiness.”

You start reading Prep as you would start watching 90210 - an insider view of a glossy, shiny, scrubbed world of rich teenagers. But Prep turns out to be so much more. It is an unedited look at real teenage life, with all its attendant misery and anxiety, all so needless to adult eyes but so terribly important to the sixteen year olds in question.

Sittenfeld writes simply. Yet truthfully..

American Wife

By Curtis Sittenfeld

There is not a little voyeurism in the attraction this book holds. A thinly veiled imagining of the life of Laura Bush, one of the more popular First Ladies (always more popular than her husband) in America, American Wife chronicles the road to the White House of a quiet, book-ish librarian from middle America.

Alice Lindgren is an only child, growing up in Wisconsin. She inherits a life-long love of books from her feisty grandmother who shapes her liberal attitude and in many ways leads her on the road to adulthood. And living in a small town where poverty wasn’t a stranger, develops in her an in-built compassion for those less privileged. Alice is definitely not a shoo-in for the wife of a spoiled rich kid with ambitions for the White House without any real abilities.

Much like Laura, Alice is involved in a motor accident as a teenager where a boy she has a crush on is killed. Andrew’s death and her subsequent disastrous mistake leave life-long scars – of guilt, an inability to be truly happy and the need to hide a past. Alice grows up beautiful, goes to college, dates boys and men she does not truly care about – and then meets Charles Blackwell.

Charles, the George Bush stand-in, is the youngest son of a meat packer tycoon. He is bluff, hearty and seriously light-weight. He is ‘enchanted’ by Alice and she in turn inexplicably falls in love with him, his cheer, his ability to make her laugh (“whenever I was with him, my life seemed dense with possibilities, fuller and noisier and far more fun…now I saw the case for larks and mischief”) The physical attraction is not light-weight and the sex feels like having a camera on in the White House bedroom! The Blackwell family and the Maj (Her Majesty is the nickname for the Barbara-like matriarch) are great attempts at portraiture, and Alice soon learns to live with in-laws she has little in common with.

As she moves on to start a life with Charles, Alice is very aware that she is taking a step that might mean living a double life – where her private belief system is constantly at war with her public face - a registered Democrat who publicly endorses a Republican husband for Governor and later the President; her own pro-choice stance at odds with her husband’s rabid anti-abortion one; her ambivalence towards religion contrasting with Charles’ born-again Christianity. She attempts a walk-out once, when his drinking gets the better of him; but she soon returns, knowing she has made a choice she wants to live with.

The best parts of the book are the first three – her childhood in Riley, life as a single working woman and her married life. There is a realness to the character that makes you feel completely empathetic towards the young mild Alice, struggling with loss (possibly the loss of the love of her life!) as a teenager, carrying a quiet confidence about her as a young woman working at a job she loves and meeting men she knows she will never love, and making a choice as a wife – a choice that meant she would sacrifice private beliefs towards building a relationship with a man she loved. The least interesting and convincing is the part in the White House. Her ruminations after a war that has gone horribly wrong, her regret that maybe she should have spoken out earlier, her token actions (not voting for her husband, talking to anti-war demonstrators) – all seem forced and uncharacteristic of a woman who had till the other day, made peace with her choices. Her justifications come across as defensive and completely unnecessary - “All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power”. The White House chapter also makes the Laura Bush shadow seem most vivid, taking away from what could be authentic fiction (without the feeling of being a peeping Tom).

But American Wife is a riveting read. The story at its heart is warming and tangible and real. It is very easy to fall in love with Alice Blackwell née Lindgren.