Sophie Gee

You can make reality yourself.

And there's this great sentence.

She's describing Cross Sugarman, who we've said multiple times, as the sort of hero of the novel.

He's the iconic prep school boy that she has a crush on.

This is the description of Cross Sugarman.

And then he says something that I want to read.

So Dee Dee, who's Lee's kind of roommate, who is kind of a like she's a B plus prep school girl.

She's kind of pretty, but not that pretty.

She's smart, but not that smart.

She says she's got a crush on Cross.

And Lee says liking him was like saying that Grateful Dead was your favorite band or saying Chapel was boring or the dining hall food was gross.

I knew that Didi had no chance with Cross.

Yes, she was rich, but she was also Jewish.

And with a big nose and the last name Schwartz, she wasn't the kind of Jewish you could hide.

She took care of herself.

Her legs were always freshly shaven.

Her hair always smelled good, but she simply wasn't that pretty.

So Cross belongs to this level of...

elitism where he just he never questions his own preeminence or the the seamless fluidity of his own life at one point someone's got some problem and cross just can't understand the problem at all he shrugs and he says you'll be okay and lee says there was something in his shrug i envied an ability to prevent misfortune by choosing not to anticipate it

And when I read that sentence, I thought, yeah, the elite prep school mindset that Curtis Sittenfeld is trying to put her finger on in this book is the precise inversion of the working class mindset that Barry Hines was depicting in A Kestra for a Knave.