A Story I Have Heard Before

There is a girl, typically a high school girl, often aged 16 or so, ALWAYS with hair described as “mousy brown.” Her looks are “ordinary.” She is awkward, which we know because she is frequently doing things like getting books out of her locker and spilling them all over the floor (oops!). She has few, if any, friends and on more than one occasion a popular blonde girl has made fun of her, typically to the amusement of her popular blonde friends.

But don’t worry about her! Because no sooner have we established her extreme dork factor by having her read Tolstoy on the school bus, than the “handsomest boy in school” performs some sort of heroic act. He picks up her books when she drops them, he catches her when she faints, performs the Heimlich maneuver after she’s downed an errant grilled cheese, swims out to save her from drowning in a polka-dot bathing suit. Like all good men throughout time, he “saves” her. As it turns out, he’s witty and charming, and although he easily talks to her, her hands are “clammy,” stomach definitively full of “butterflies,” and stammering is always involved. She is in disbelief that this handsome creature has deigned to acknowledge her existence. Though I know I’ve seen this conceit a million places, the specific examples I can think of here are season one of Gilmore Girls, a book I just read called Prep, and at some point in Ugly Betty.

This storyline is wrong to me for a number of reasons. Number One, as a certified ordinary Mousy Brown in high school, who read on the school bus and was regularly in need of saving, this kind of thing NEVER HAPPENED TO ME. Pretty blonde girls need saving all the time, and there just isn’t enough teenage boy heroism to go around. The second thing that’s wrong here is that teenage boys are some of the least witty and charming human beings on the planet (and they never have skin as good as Jared Padalecki’s). Finally: Why can’t mousy brown just be okay? Why does she need the basketball captain to fall in love with her? The only answer I can come up with is that society has determined that dorky women need the handsomest boy to be Okay. Somehow, a teenage boy falling in love with you validates your existence.
These were the ideas going through my head last night as I read Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld, a hum-drum book about a girl named Lee who goes to an elite East Coast boarding school. I had heard great things about the book by people who know stuff about books. This book annoyitated me for several reasons. First, the main character is a poorly disguised stand-in for the author, whose mousy brown mug can be found on the back flap. The main character’s name is “Lee” and she’s a girl. And the author’s name is “Curtis” and she too is a girl. Get it? The book’s chapters are divided up by the semesters at school and each chapter could basically be called “funny stuff that happened this one time” because the stories in each rarely intersect in any kind of meaningful way, save for the fact that they seem to happen to the same bunch of characters (same characters doth not plot continuity make). And what happens (“plot”), like everything that happens in high school, is basically meaningless. What I’ve always found appealing about the teenage narrator is that everything seems really important – this is an easy way to give a story significance. In high school, everything always feels like the end of the world. But Sittenfeld is desperate to show you how she’s Come So Far since those silly high school days, that she occasionally, much to the vertigo of the reader, inserts Wise Reflections telling you just how little the moment actually means in the Grand Scheme of Things (Message!). Essentially, she sets up all the drama of a scene, assembles its characters, executes it well, but then deflates it. For example, there’s a quite compelling scene where Lee’s parents come visit her at school and she’s snotty to them. Her father slaps her and tells her that she’s become an east coast snob, and has forgotten her Indiana roots. Immediately following this scene, there are three pages of narration saying (1) that the family laughed about it in retrospect (2) that her father never hit her again (3) that she and her father eventually became very close. So you’re left wondering, why did you tell me this? Teenagers have no perspective, which is why they’re fun to write with – the author doesn’t have to worry about not placing enough gravity in the situation, because with teenagers, everything has gravity. Unless, after every single scene that might mean something, an Older Self dues ex machinas her way into the narrative to tell you it didn’t really mean anything after all. I can just imagine this in Catcher in the Rye (which this book is compared to in a cringe-worthy blurb on the back from Wally Lamb). “Gee, I was so alienated and cynical at the time. I felt that everything was phony. In retrospect, I realize the value of human existence.” (To be fair, Holden does narrate in retrospect, but it’s only a year later, and he’s in a psych ward for crying out loud, where Prep’s narrator seems to be lodged in happily married suburbia, post-college). The grown-up voice also just feels like a cop-out – the writer is too lazy to stay with the voice and let it carry the story.

Anyway, I recently read a fantastic teenage narrative in Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics which is full of pop culture and literature references, and if you haven’t read it already, please drop what you are doing and proceed directly to Amazon.com, where you too can experience this book for a mere $6.15. I read this book almost a week ago and I can’t stop thinking about it. In fact, that’s why I haven’t blogged about it yet, because it seemed to render me speechless. More later!