The Class Action Book of the Month November 2005
Brief Review and Reflection
“Straddler Fiction”
A Novel: PREP, by Curtis Sittenfeld
Most of our reviewed books have been nonfiction books about class and race, but this month we recommend the novel PREP, the first book by a promising young woman writer named Curtis Sittenfield.
Prep is the story of Lee Fiora, a young woman from South Bend, Indiana who receives a scholarship and enrolls as a freshman at a fictional Massachusetts prep academy called the Ault School. Lee is the daughter of a mattress salesman who feels her “lower middle class” status in the elite upper school culture of Ault.
As a work of fiction, Prep gives a powerful and painful glimpse into the “class straddler” experience in a first person coming-of-age story. Straddlers characterizes the dilemma of people who are raised poor or working class –and cross the class divide in their education experience, work and relationships. [See our previous Book of the Month, Limbo, by Alfred Lubrano]
Lee personifies the straddler experience. She feels like an outsider and spends most of her first two years trying to disappear in social situations. Lee and many straddlers feel estranged in their new class environment –and embarrassed by the class culture of their parents.
Ault School depicts many of the myths and realities of prep school life: wealthy students that send their laundry out to cleaners, class coding by clothing, and a group of called the Bank Boys because there fathers all work in Wall Street finance.
Prep also uncovers some of the complexities of class. A Latina girl that Lee assumes is also on scholarship and an outcast like she turns out to be from one of the richest families in the school. And after one date, Lee pulls back from seeing a decent young man who works in the Ault dining room because he is a “townie.” Prep is decent class fiction.
A Reflection on Prep and the Straddler Experience
Class Action’s Corinna Yazbek identifies as a straddler who grew up in poverty in the South and attended elite Mount Holyoke College. She facilitates a support group for “straddler” college students.
The most powerful part of the book for me was after Lee’s mom drops her off at the airport for the last time. Lee thinks to herself: “I hated them because they thought I was the same as they were, because if they were right, it would mean I’d failed myself, and because if they were wrong, it would mean I had betrayed them.”
I want to frame that quote or get it tattooed somewhere on my body. It totally captures the classic straddler dilemma --I want a better life than my parents had but I don’t want it to mean that I’m a better person than them. Because if I believe I am superior to my parents, it means I’ve bought into classism and have internalized the negative messages about myself and my family -- and that maybe people were right all along when they looked down on me.
Like Lee in Prep, I didn’t want my friends to meet my mom because I was ashamed of her -- her choices in life, what she did for a living, the car she drove. I didn’t think my mother was normal and certainly not valuable in society. I thought my friend’s parents were normal and had important jobs -- they were doctors and lawyers and teachers and contractors. Waitresses and welfare moms are the opposite -- they suck up all the country’s resources. The messages I got about welfare recipients made me think that the tax dollars paid by the parents of my friends were paying my mom to make more babies. How horrifying is that?!
Like Lee, I was always gazing up the class ladder. If she’d been friends with kids from the same background or poorer backgrounds then maybe she would have had a different sense of normal -- same goes for me. Places like private schools really mess with a person’s class reality. Lee never went home and bonded with her parents over how much money Ault School kids would spend and how privileged they were. And when I talked about privileged students at Mount Holyoke with my mom or my grandmother, I know there was a longing in my voice, because there was a longing in my heart to have what the other kids had and do what they got to do.
Lee’s reluctance to talk about what her dad did for a living or anything really --she kept where she came from as well hidden as she could --was a way of being invisible enough to pass. If she just stayed far enough under the radar, maybe no one else would notice the clothes she wore, where she got her bedspread, where she went on vacations, etc. Unless they were as hyper-aware of everyone else as she was! She created files on and catalogued people in a way that totally stripped them of their humanity. She barely let anyone into her heart. She had this amazing vigilant defense mechanism against being disappointed. Detachment, I guess?
Lee’s relationship with her crush, a golden boy named Cross, is interesting. I can identify with internalizing the messages we get from teen magazines about what girls want from boys (relationships) and what boys want from girls (sex). It became this self-fulfilling prophecy because, as Cross pointed out to her, Lee was the one who said sex didn’t mean they were in a relationship. It was like that defense mechanism so he couldn’t disappoint her. She wasn’t ever willing to put herself out there, take a risk.
The one big risk she took was either subconscious or a total accident, which was telling the NY Times reporter about the class realities at Ault. This also says to me that token poor people, women, or people of color are just set up unless there are institutional supports there for them. She was eager to purge everything she’d been filing away for four years because she’d never had a chance to talk about class before. There are so few private education institutions that encourage students to talk about their different class experiences, and when we’re just trying to fit in and keep up academically sometimes we’re all too happy to just try to pretend it’s not a big deal. The reality, though, is that it is a big deal. The cost of assimilating or passing is losing the part of ourselves that makes us different, forgetting where and who we come from…betraying not only our families but ourselves.