One of my favorite books (tied with Eloise and the Feminine Mystique) is Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. I don’t want to call it chick lit, because female writers have been lashing out at the term, because they feel it’s demeaning to and marginalizing of women’s literature, but also because Prep is a deep story. Prep has all the elements to make it incredible beach reading: it’s the story of a girl from the Midwest who goes to boarding school, and falls in love with the cutest guy in her grade, makes “frenemies” with the popular girls, and has a funny and nice best friend who makes for a lot of laughs. In the end, the heroine, Lee, ends up hooking up with her crush and graduating from school with her best friend.
However, Prep is also an intense and important discussion of gender, race, and class. Lee, who came from a lower-middle class background, feels isolated from the other students who are all very wealthy. She learns that the guys have an edge in the school (she notes that each class has a male and a female class president because girls wouldn’t be elected if the school didn’t require a girl) and that some of the popular boys have an underground plan to hook up with every girl in school, which Lee sees as intensely degrading (the guys sees the girls as sexual conquests more than sexual partners). Lee notes that the people of color on campus tend to be gardeners, not studemts.
However, the book isn’t rant-y at all: for example, in discussing the class issue, Lee wonders how everyone knows what “86th and Lex” is, and eventually figures out that it is because many of her peers were raised in or are familiar with Manhattan’s Upper East Side; she also discusses how the students talk about how bad the food is in front of the people who work in the kitchen as if they don’t exist.
(Which made me feel terrible, because in the cafeteria at school, my friends and I are always saying, “I am NOT eating this,” without ever thinking about who might be listening).
Prep is the perfect example of how one can talk so people will listen, and how you can educate others and have them not even register that they are being educated because they’re enjoying themselves so much. That is, unless you’re me, because Prep really changed my life.
The movie rights for Prep have been bought, and if in fact it will be made into a movie, I will probably show up to the movie theatre in costume, a la the costumed Harry Potter fans, except instead of wearing a cape and a witch hat, I’ll sport a Lacoste polo, a Ralph Lauren skirt, and a Coach bag.
Oh, wait–that’s what I would wear anyway!