Fighting, against trauma and elitism, to connect
Part of the human condition is the aching yearning to belong. The ones who can't fit in often struggle to make family out of whoever might be available. This fumbling toward connection, this sense of being a stranger in an even stranger land, comes front and center in two terrific first novels.
Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep" (Random House, $21.95) has a jaunty pink and green web belt on the cover, but don't let that sweet candy-coating fool you. "Prep" may be as addictive as M & Ms, but it's also a tart and complex tale of social class, race, and gender politics. Told from the viewpoint of its older and wiser protagonist, it focuses on funny, sarcastic fish-out-of-water Lee Fiora, an Indiana scholarship student at tonier-than-thou Ault, an Eastern boarding school.
Lee quickly finds that to succeed at Ault, you need to have been dipped in the right gene pool. Money and class are trump cards you can't afford not to hold. Lee's the outcast, in the same group as the undesirable ethnics and the all-out nerds. Determined not to be an outsider, she quickly manipulates her talent for cutting hair into an entre into the upper echelons. Complex and determined, Lee propels her raging crush on uber-handsome Cross Sugarman into a kind of relationship, but even snagging such a prize isn't quite good enough to erase her outsider status at Ault.
Sittenfeld, a boarding-school alumna, infuses her narrative with an achingly funny authenticity. A keen-eyed writer (she won the Seventeen magazine fiction contest at 16), Sittenfeld gives Lee a pitch-perfect voice that's brimming with acute self-consciousness and wit. This is a book that's rich in both character and ideas. What is the price tag that comes with privilege? How do you navigate the cost of belonging? Lee's snobbery about her parents is wincingly real. She's shamed by her folks, particularly her brash father. "I hated them because they thought I was the same as they were," Lee says, "because if they were right, it would mean I'd failed myself, and because if they were wrong, it would mean I had betrayed them." Sittenfeld brings home this point of class with a slightly stagy ending, when a New York Times journalist comes to the school to interview students about privilege and Lee spills out her heart with predictable results.
Lee's growing self-awareness infuses the book with a wonderful restless melancholy. Years after graduation, when she sees a shampoo the cool Ault girls used, her first instinct is to assume she can't buy it, and when she does, she feels guilty. As if "everything was better when you were denied."
If Lee's true life began when she was a teenager, that of the protagonist of Dave King's "The Ha-Ha" (Little, Brown, $23.95) ended at about the same time. Thirty years ago, Howard left his sweetheart, Sylvia, and months later lost everything in Vietnam. He comes home unable to read or write or speak, locked inside a silent world of disconnection. He lives in a house with two housepainters, Steve and Harrison, and soup chef Laurel, sharing rent but not much else. For money, Howard works as a groundskeeper for a convent, pining for his lost life and for Sylvia, who's now a single mom of another man's child. But when Sylvia goes into rehab, there's nowhere else for her 9-year-old son, Ryan, to stay except with Howard.
Suddenly, Howard has to find a way to communicate with this boy. Out of desperate necessity, he ventures into the world. To his shock, there are actual pleasures. He squires Ryan to baseball games. He begins to share meals with his housemates in hopes of granting Ryan a sense of family, and to his surprise, he finds some family himself. And though he still pines for Sylvia, he begins to sense something simmering between himself and Laurel. "How long has it been that I couldn't predict what lay ahead?" Howard asks in gratitude. But then Sylvia leaves rehab and wants her son and her life back, and Howard's about to lose everything all over again.
King allows us to intimately know and appreciate his characters, and his spare, graceful style is reminiscent of Kent Haruf's "Plainsong." The ha-ha, which is a ditch containing a retaining wall, pops up throughout the book as a slightly forced metaphor for Howard's injury. But King's prodigious gift is to open up that wall and reveal Howard's rich inner life, and in the process he spins a luminous meditation on war, family, and all the ways we can converse. There may not be surprises in the plot, and there is one clunky subplot about a crazy homeless vet that seems unnecessary, but these small quibbles don't really mar the absolute power of "The Ha-Ha." "We're lucky," Laurel tells Howard at the end of the book, and it's to King's credit that despite all that happens in the novel, we feel these people are lucky, too.
"Why am I here?" Howard asks in the very first line of "The Ha-Ha." It's a question that resonates in both this book and in "Prep." What does it mean to be outside the norm? What purpose can you serve in life if you feel you're denied admission to all the festivities? Despite the pain and frustration, these two fine novels show, the state of not belonging can bring unexpected and myriad rewards.
Caroline Leavitt's novel "Girls in Trouble" will be published in paperback in April. She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com. 