Sophie Gee

about Malik boarding school as an insider.

You have to be an outsider.

And I would sort of say that that relationship of being from the wrong class or being of the wrong race, being of the wrong religion, just coming from the wrong part of the country, even from the wrong side of town, that is almost always the structure of an American novel.

That's what an American novel is.

And I think it's...

not an overclaim about this novel to say that she really is kind of doing a retake on The Great Gatsby.

She's doing a, you know, Jay Gatsby goes to high school kind of a novel because Gatsby, of course, let's remember the main characters, they're from the Middle West, as they called it.

They're from the centre of the country.

They've come east and east gives them this kind of opportunity to redefine themselves, make a new start, follow the American dream.

But it also, of course, reinforces a lot of the old,

hierarchies and social systems, social stratas that they are seeking to avoid from their upbringings in the Middle West.

So I think that's, it's actually sort of a quite purposeful literary relationship that Sittenfeld is creating in this novel.

The other thing I wanted to, I think this is a quibble, is this question of whether your school days are the most vivid days of your life and that's sort of why you gravitate towards them.

It's certainly true that there's a lot of vivid about school and

But I also think there's something about school, and I think this is why the genre is really interesting.

There's something about school where the nature of the institution is so strange, the way that it traps these very young people day in, day out.

in a kind of miniature town, a little sort of feudal world with teachers, all of whom are struggling with their own lives in different ways, a sort of system of leadership, the head of the school and the school administration, the professional staff, the teaching staff, even the campus itself,

It's sort of the first institutional setting that everyone goes into outside their own family.

It's the first time you see a system that isn't your family system.

And I think that's what makes schools so strange and lends them so well to these quite odd narratives that you can generate for them.