Prep for Life

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Best-selling, award-winning author John Green wrote his first novel, Looking for Alaska, about teens at a prep school in Alabama. Not your stereotypical setting for a private school for high school students, Culver Creek Boarding School doesn't have particularly beautiful buildings or fancy landscaping, but otherwise offers the same experiences as any highly-regarded prep school. When Miles Halter comes to “the Creek” as a new student, for his junior year, he finds this experience includes challenging classes, professors with doctorates, sharp divisions in social class between the scholarship kids (like himself) and the wealthy kids, dorm rooms full of all kinds of contraband, pranks and angst, typical teen rebellion mixed with striving to reach the bar of high expectations. Lucky for Miles, his roommate, Chip Martin, takes him firmly under his wing, gives him a nickname, introduces Miles to his group of friends, and tells him all the rules that aren't in any handbook.

The relationship between Chip (“The Colonel”) and Miles (“Pudge”, because Miles is super-skinny) reminded me of Phineas and Gene in John Knowles' classic coming-of-age novel, A Separate Peace. Especially in the beginning, Miles, like Gene, is an introvert, uncomfortable in many social situations, preferring to spend time alone, reading. Chip, on the other hand, is the one with a rebellious streak, pushing or circumventing the rules. Chip is “The Colonel” because he is the strategist and mastermind behind the elaborate game of pranks that is part of the tradition and the social structure at “The Creek.” In Green's more contemporary take on the prep school novel, this scene is co-ed. This is where Alaska Young comes in. Alaska provides the spark: she is charisma, the larger-than-life character who, Phineas, draws people to her like moths to a flame. She is beautiful, chaotic, fiercely intelligent, melodramatic, and it would seem she enjoys leaving jealousy, love, frustration, annoyance, inspiration, and tragedy in her wake. As Gene learns at Devon Academy in the 1940s, so Miles learns at Culver Creek in the present: ultimately, the coming-of-age experience is more about the people you meet, and the relationships you have, then the actual setting.

Author Curtis Sittenfeld highlights many of these same themes in her young adult novel, Prep. Lee Fiora leaves her middle-class family in Indiana to study at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts for her four years of high school. Like Gene in A Separate Peace and Miles in Looking for Alaska, Lee usually views life at Ault feeling like an outsider. She, like Miles and his friends, is a scholarship student, and the money which “was everywhere on campus, but … usually invisible” turns out to be more intimidating and divisive rather than the way it looked charming in the brochures. As a narrator, Lee becomes a keen, wry observer of prep school life – both as the teenage student she was, and as the twenty-something adult looking back on her experiences.

All three of these novels were the first for authors who have gone on to become well-known for their writing. It is interesting to note that all three debut novels focused on the prep school setting as a place to explore teens' first opportunities to wrestle with the complexities of socio-economic class, gender politics, sex, social mores, romantic relationships, friendships, interactions with authority figures and mentors, hope, tragedy, and forgiveness. Each author beautifully guides the main protagonist to a place where he or she can forgive themselves for being young, naïve, ignorant, or scared when faced with the intense situations they encounter at school, on their own for the first time. Each novel, in the capable prose of John Green, John Knowles, and Curtis Sittenfeld, becomes a springboard for discussing larger life truths.

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