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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: Almanac

March 7, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“I think that when I began to write more characteristic poetry, I’d found how to make poems as readable as novels, if you see what I mean.”


Philip Larkin, interviewed by Neil Powell (Tracks, Summer 1967)

OGIC: Paperback Book club

March 7, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Note: Over the next week or so, I will be corresponding with my friend Kenneth Burns–who leads a double online life here and here–about Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep, recently released in paperback. This is the first installment.


Dear Kenneth,


I was glad to hear that you were also a fan of Prep. Both of us have personal reasons for being interested in the book, and I trust we’ll get around to discussing those eventually. To begin, though, I want to touch on what seemed to me the novel’s strong points.


I thought the two main qualities that made the novel stand out were its refusal to idealize its protagonist, Lee, and its success at rendering both a problem character and a problem setting with such thick particularity. A few weeks back, Curtis Sittenfeld wrote in the New York Times Book Review about the hell she has taken from some readers for putting at the center of her novel a flawed and sometimes downright unappealing character. For me, this feature was crucial to the book’s interest. The basic story Prep tells is of an encounter between strangers, the Ault School and Lee Fiora: the east coast bastion of privilege, and the interloper from the midwest whose romance with and skepticism toward it are both functions of her intense self-consciousness. As determining factors, Lee’s psychology and Ault’s social dynamic are held in exquisite balance. But the way I’ll probably finally remember Prep is as a great portrait of self-consciousness–a form of psychological experience that can practically be honed to an art form by teenage girls (and probably boys, too, but neither Prep nor my own experience can speak to that).


Part of what I loved about Prep was its willingness to take this rawest form of self-consciousness seriously as a social and psychological phenomenon–by mercilessly anatomizing it. I think the novel is about as insightful on such matters as the late great television show Freaks and Geeks (I can’t remember whether you were a fan), though it is less comic and much harder on its protagonist. Here I’ll pause to note what a fantastically page-turning read Prep is–I zoomed through it at warp speed–and how great the temptation therefore is to dismiss it as fluff. It’s one of those books that I would put down only reluctantly and pick up again hungrily, as if it were a letter full of juicy gossip about everyone I’ve ever known. So the impulse is to dismiss it, and I think that snap judgment is sadly telling about our mistrust of certain kinds of pleasure in reading. (And by “us” I mean, roughly, anyone who ever used the phrase “literary fiction” in earnest, which I do close to daily.)


So Lee hides in the dormitory phone booth or reflects, “I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction.” I recognized this way of thinking; it’s something I’ve thought before, but never very consciously. Because of the extremity of Lee’s social circumstances and the almost surgical style Sittenfeld employs, the dissection Prep performs–both social and psychological–regularly unearths insights like this, bringing submerged modes of thinking to the surface.


So what did you like about the novel?


Yours,


OGIC

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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