By Eva Ciabattoni

Growing up in two places - a suburb of Vienna, Austria, and a suburb in Ohio’s rust belt - didn’t expose me to gaping disparities in wealth. In Ohio, the richest children were the pharmacists’ and doctors’ children. They owned sturdy houses in Austin Estates; the rest of us rented. A few had in-ground pools; the rest of us had above-ground pools from Kmart that blew away during tornadoes. But that was about it. In Austria, huge wealth deltas would be considered shameful. People owned homes and cobbled together a good life as vintners, seamstresses, snow removers; they lived next door to lawyers and businessmen.

Then at Mount Holyoke College, I met Sally, whose dad owned a mattress factory and seven Rolls-Royces - a beer-and-pretzels millionaire compared to the champagne-and-caviar millionaires running Wall Street and corporations, but still. Sally threw herself a birthday party fall of freshman year. It didn’t occur to her to serve refreshments; the guests’ pleasure was to consist of watching Sally open her presents - dozens of presents, each carefully wrapped so the paper overlapped without a seam. I left after the alpaca sweater - to study. (To Sally’s chagrin, I beat her four years running for first in class. It upset the natural order of things.)

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s bestseller “Prep” (Random House, 2005), main character Lee Fiora, like Sittenfeld herself, leaves a Midwestern town to attend a posh Eastern prep school. There she encounters the golden boys and girls of the upper crust - boys and girls with names like Cross Sugarman and Aspeth Montgomery. Lee doesn’t fit in socially or academically. When she returns to the Midwest for vacations, she doesn’t fit in there either. Lee yearns for belonging, but wrecks any chance of attaining it.

Sittenfeld is a graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so it’s a given that she knows craft and that “Prep” is well-written. Publicists fought over who would represent it. It’s got that preppy, textured pink and chartreuse belt on the cover. But self-destructive Lee is a hard character to like. The natural order of things is firmly established in “Prep,” and Lee will not be the one to turn it on its head - she believes in its inherent rightness too strongly. After graduation, the preppies go off to the Ivies and Lee returns to the Midwest.

There are many gems in “Prep” that feel completely earned, like when Lee hooks up with Cross (or Sug, as Aspeth calls him) and observes, “And now something mattered, there was something for me to ruin.” Or when she discovers her talent for haircutting and thinks, “It was like being good at untying knots or reading maps.” Lee on racism: “Racism seemed to me like a holdover from my parents’ generation, something that was not entirely gone but had fallen out of favor - like girdles, say, or meatloaf.” But ultimately “Prep” isn’t about much of anything, and it asks very little of the reader. I bet Sally loved it.