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Chapter 1: What cultural elements define American preppy culture in 'Prep'?
Did Nero really fiddle while Rome burned? Did Oedipus actually have a complex? And how did a quarter of a million spectators at the Circus Maximus get by with only one loo? Welcome to Instant Classics. I'm Mary Beard, historian and contrarian. And I'm Charlotte Higgins, Guardian journalist and classicist on the side.
Instant Classics is a podcast with one foot in the ancient world and one foot in the present. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of classical Greece and Rome to discover what they still mean to us now, from Greek myth to gladiators and from togas to tragedy. And...
If you're as excited about Christopher Nolan's forthcoming Odyssey movie as we are, you may want to join the Instant Classics Book Club. We're making our own Odyssey through Homer's masterpiece, one book at a time. Instant Classics, ancient stories, modern twists, and no degree in classics required. And we're not just... Two blokes. Suck on that patriarchy.
Right.
Sophie, what's your favourite American high school film?
So many to pick from, Jonty. I was just making a little list. And before I tell you, you have to guess. Here's what I've got. Clueless, Bring It On, The Breakfast Club, Fame, Rushmore, Gross Point Blank or Say Anything. Have you seen all of those films?
Most of them.
Have you seen Rushmore?
Yeah. Is that your favourite?
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Chapter 2: How does Curtis Sittenfeld's 'Prep' compare to 'The Great Gatsby'?
I don't even know the language. Scoring my next try in American football. What would I do? Touchdown, dude. Touchdown. I'm all about the touchdown.
Yeah, nice. I'm Sophie G. I'm hot. I'm cute. I've got it all going on. I'm the homecoming queen. I stand up in the middle of school assembly with my boombox and I dance wildly to classic rock. This week, I don't think anyone's going to have guessed what the book is. This week is Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. So we're rounding out our series on high school novels.
And we've so far been located in Britain, but we're jumping across the Atlantic this week and several decades. And we're in 1990s Massachusetts with the American novelist Curtis Sittenfeld's first book, Prep.
Early on in the novel, little Washington, the soon to be expelled African-American student who is there on full financial aid, tells the novel's heroine, Lee, how she knows that Lee, too, is also a financial aid kid. is that she doesn't have a flowery bedspread.
Welcome to American Preppy Culture, which is going to be one of the big focuses of our episode today, and to be totally honest with you, one of the major reasons that I really wanted to talk about this book. Welcome to the world of Laura Ashley dresses, L.L.
Bean canvas tote bags with initials monogrammed on them, goldfish crackers for dinner, classic rock boomboxes, pink shorts, and bow ties with whales on them. As in the other three school stories that we've covered so far in this series, the ultra elite East Coast boarding school of Sittenfeld's 2005 novel, PrEP, is a microcosm of the nation at large, or at least of a decent slice of it.
In this case, we're looking at the class conscious world of East Coast America and the boarding schools that are raising up the future students of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and their peer institutions, as we say over here. Sidenfeld is taking the milieu, the social milieu of The Great Gatsby. She's moving it half a century onward from Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
And she's made the characters 10 years younger. We're basically looking at Daisy and Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway when they were still in high school, wondering whether they should be using a different brand of deodorant or who will pick up the tab if they call a taxi at the end of the night.
were among old money, aspirational new wealth and careless people in a fictional East Coast boarding school called Alt. But Alt is instantly recognisable to those in the know as the real-life Massachusetts boarding school Groton, where Curtis Sittenfeld herself went in the late 80s and 90s.
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Chapter 3: What themes of class and privilege are explored in 'Prep'?
Over four years, Lee drifts through friendships, crushes and academic pressure while observing the subtle hierarchies that shape student life. I mean, nil point for subtle hierarchies. She develops intent... She develops intent... OK, we've had enough.
We've had enough.
I will. I want listeners to know that when I draft synopses, I always put a few jokes in there and I give those jokes to you. You gave me no jokes.
I just want the listeners to know that I'm very exhausted and it's it's kind of Sittenfeld's fault because of the elite boarding school system in North America. I have had a gruelling term. teaching English literature at Princeton, which finished yesterday. And I have been teaching the students who come out of this very system. They're groomed. They're hungry for knowledge.
They know how to write an essay. They plan ahead. And boy, they expect to get value for money in the classroom. And they've run me dry, Jonty. I've got nothing left. I couldn't write a synopsis.
Give us a reading from this book, Sophie.
All right. We had a bit of a barney, didn't we, Jonty, about which the reading should be. I really strongly preferred the other passage in which we'll get to. I think like as we've observed in our previous episodes on school stories, the nature of the school situation is such that it really brings out the sort of anxious competitive spirit.
You know, it's as though we're in the math classroom or we're in the ancient history classroom, Jonty, and we've done, we've accidentally done
done the same assignment and the question is who's going to have the upper hand and present it first so i'm going to read the passage that we both highlighted when we read the novel and i think what this passage is it is is about the kind of anxiety that attends life in a place like alt or groton as it is in real life
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Chapter 4: How does the character Lee navigate her identity at Ault?
And she's been very insistent in saying that, although obviously there's a lot of overlap. And Sittenfeld... grew up in the Midwest and went to Groton, which is the school that Ault is based on. A big difference is that the Lee character comes from a much more what one would call lower middle class background. And I use that term in this context because it comes up in the book.
And we've talked about lower middle class in the British class system.
Well, we've said it's our favorite class, Jonty.
It's our favourite class. And it comes up in this book where LMC, standing for lower middle class, is like the worst thing you can say about someone. And so Lee comes from a lower middle class background and is deeply ashamed about that and spends pretty much her entire school career concealing her background, her father's job, everything about her life.
And one of the most excruciating scenes in the middle of the book is when her parents come for a parents weekend at the school and And there's a moment where her home life and the school clash. But the big difference between Lee and Curtis Sidenfeld herself is that Sidenfeld didn't come from that background. She came from a much more affluent background.
So although she came from the Midwest, her father was an investment banker. Her mother was a teacher. And I'm really struck by the fact that she has to move her character further down the social scale. It's almost impossible, I think, for somebody to write a book about elite education in which your central character just comes from the elite.
Like, I don't think anyone's going to go with that as a story. What we can all relate to is the idea of feeling like an outsider, of not feeling quite good enough and not feeling part of that world. But the line I loved from an interview Sittenfeld did was that she said the reason why she wanted to write the book, she didn't want it to be a critique of elite schools.
It was just a school she went to. And she said, I feel like my childhood and adolescence are more vivid to me. The world sort of makes a bigger impression on you then because everything is so much newer. And I think that's true for all of us, that the weight that our school experiences hold in our memories and our imagination is
outweighs pretty much everything else we do in our lives, with exceptions, you know, love, childbirth, et cetera, et cetera. But those school years, they run through us like rocks. So much of our insecurities and our beliefs and our values and our friendships come back to that moment. And I think a lot of books about schools... aren't that interested in the daily experience of being at school.
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Chapter 5: What role does the game 'Assassin' play in the story?
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. So maybe we can take that as a cue to think about how Siddhantel structures the book.
Yeah, and one of the narrative threads in the book is precisely what you're describing. It's Lee's identity separating increasingly from her background and her family. And there's a point quite late in the book where she says, my identity now was the alt-identity. It was the identity. I was no longer part of that world.
And in some of the final scenes, when she's back home with her parents, she has nothing to say. She's almost silent because she's so separate from them. On your earlier point about this linking to the American tradition of the Great Gatsby, yes, that's completely true.
And I think in terms of deciding to do our fourth book in this series is leaping across the Great Pond, as they used to say, leaping across to America. Part of our intention is to see how the school novel, how school fiction becomes different in an American context. And I think it's precisely that. It's the great gapsification of the school book.
Because if you take the previous books, we've done it in this series, none of the heroes are outsiders in the school system as such. Like Tom Brown, he is Cross Sugarman. In this book, he would be Cross Sugarman.
Who's the sort of... Hot male character. There's a great moment where the heroine, whose name is Lee, says to Cross, where are you from? And he says, the city. And she says, Boston, because that's the closest city to the school. And he says, New York. Like there is only one city in America.
And then in the prime of Miss Jean Brody, the whole point about the girls is they're not outsiders. Jean Brody wants them to be the creme de la creme. And as we joked about, they're completely unexceptional. They are just part of the middle-class world of Edinburgh. And the outsider is Jean Brody herself. And everyone's having to kind of navigate around this figure.
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Chapter 6: How does Lee's relationship with Conquita highlight class differences?
It then turns out she's been offered financial assistance. So that's how she ends up ends up going. And I love this passage, not least because a lot of attention is given to wool sweaters. A shout out for wool sweaters.
Love a wool sweater. Alt had been my idea. I'd researched boarding schools at the public library and written away for catalogs myself. Their glossy pages showed photographs of teenagers in wool sweaters, there they are, singing hymns in the chapel, gripping lacrosse sticks, intently regarding a math equation written across the chalkboard. I'd trade away my family for this glossiness.
I pretended it was about academics, but it never had been. Marvin Thompson High School, the school I would have attended in South Bend, had hallways of pale green linoleum and grimy lockers and stringy haired boys who wrote the names of heavy metal bands across the backs of their denim jackets in black marker.
But boarding school boys, at least the ones in the catalogs who held lacrosse sticks and grinned over their mouth guards, were so handsome. And they had to be smart, too, by virtue of the fact that they attended boarding school. I imagine that if I left South Bend, I would meet a melancholy athletic boy who liked to read as much as I did.
And on overcast Sundays, we would take walks together wearing, inevitably, wool sweaters.
Hmm.
It's good.
And this first chapter, it becomes about the sacrifice that Lee has to make to earn her place in in Alts. She talks about her roommates. But the character who becomes most significant in this chapter is a black student who's there on full financial aid called Little Washington. And we discovered that there's a thief at work who is stealing money from people's rooms.
And ultimately, Lee and Little Washington are sort of being positioned together because they're the outsiders. And Lee knows that in order to... keep her place in alt, to be able to make it into the mainstream and be accepted. She has an opportunity to betray Little Washington. She discovers that Little Washington is the thief. And that's the sacrifice she makes, isn't it?
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Chapter 7: What does the chapter 'Spring Cleaning' reveal about Lee's struggles?
I know that's a pretty big deal. And little Washington says, she's about like everyone else here. Really? She seems different. Little set the bottle of oil on the counter, it's hair oil, another race marker, and leaned in close to the mirror, peering at her skin. Then she said, she's rich. That's what Gates is. Her family has a whole lot of money.
She stepped back and made a face in the mirror, sucking in her cheeks and arching her eyebrows. It's the kind of thing I'd have done alone, but never in front of another person. I thought Gates was from a farm, I said. a farm that's half the state of Idaho, where people grow potatoes. Bet you didn't think such a nasty little vegetable could be worth so much money.
So the conflict in the first chapter is a conflict based on class. It's about how much money you have. But ultimately, it's a conflict about the way that the underserved, the unprivileged white character perceives privilege versus the way that the underserved, poor black character perceives white privilege.
So in that first chapter, there's very much a feeling that the betraying of Little Washington, the exposing her as a thief, which results in Little Washington being expelled from the school, is the sacrificial act that Lee makes to buy herself just a little bit of acceptance. So into the second chapter, she's more established at school.
But the third chapter, which is another masterful short story, essentially, is about an annual game that's played at the school called Assassin. I mean, the rules are too complicated to explain, but basically it involves all the students taking each other out one by one by putting stickers on them and gotcha.
And then once you've taken someone out, you get the person they're meant to be assassinating. And through a process of elimination, there's one winner.
Now, Lee gets really into this because her fancy is that if she eliminates enough people, she will find herself going head to head in an assassination with her crush, who is Cross Sugarman, who becomes an increasing presence over the course of the book. Cross is, as we've said, very much part of the privileged elite.
And she's convinced that he's going to get to the final stages of Assassin, because how could he not? Running in the background of this is the fact that a girl called Conquita, who has Mexican heritage, has started to befriend Lee. And Lee is slightly unsure how close she wants to get to Conquita.
Conquita, who she at first assumes, again, because of racial stereotype, she assumes that Conquita must be like her from a less privileged background, probably there with financial assistance. And the twist is that when she goes out for lunch with Conquita and her mother comes It turns out they are immensely rich. The family is probably the richest family at the school.
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Chapter 8: How does 'Prep' reflect on the pre-9/11 American elite experience?
The third thing I knew about him, and this made the other two all the more interesting, was that supposedly he had the highest GPA in his class. At any rate, he was headed to Yale. So Adam Rabinowitz is this iconic character of Yale.
east coast privilege although it doesn't explicitly say so he's obviously jewish with the with the last name rabinowitz and he's from this kind of jewish elite that forms one half of the kind of elite white world of this book the other half being protestants the episcopal characters and there's a moment where the heroine is reflecting on what what she finds so fascinating but also kind of
repellent or horrifying about adam and this is what she says i wasn't thinking much about assassin what the announcement left me with mostly i couldn't have articulated that then and i might not have believed it if someone else had suggested it was the sense that i wanted to be adam rabinowitz the interest i felt in certain guys then confused me because it wasn't romantic i
But I wasn't sure what else it might be. But now I know. I wanted to take out people's time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high school boy so fucking sure of my place in the world.
And so I think that although the kind of arc of this chapter is Conquita goes up and Lee goes down in our estimation and Conquita kills Lee, we've got this undercurrent of Lee's, the particular flavor of Lee's anxiety. She's a woman. She's from a less privileged background. She doesn't belong to this sort of patriarchal world.
that she's seeing in front of her and she knows that it's kind of going to be a problem, it's going to hold her back. I should say, parenthetically, that my American friends who are listening to this episode, we all know the real life Adam Rabinowitz, the man whose penis made it onto page 32 of PrEP. So I'm just doing a quick shout out.
The guy with the plaster of Paris penis, if you're listening to this episode, we know who you are.
Great. And I think, Sophie, we should use that moment to take a break to reflect upon that. In fact, the other thing I want to do in this break is I'm going to go and put on a wool sweater because in the hope that it will transform me into a melancholy, athletic boy who liked to read. I'm going to put on this sweater and see if it turns me into a dreamboat back in a moment. How's that?
Oh, boy. You so fit into the world, Jonti.
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