Word: prepped
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Sittenfeld's first novel, Prep, was distinguished by the dead-on observations of upper-class life by a working-class narrator - a narrator, one imagines, not unlike Sittenfeld herself, who was jolted from Cincinnati to the rarefied precincts of the Groton School in Massachusetts. There is a similar class consciousness in American Wife, especially in the luscious passages in which Alice describes her first encounters with the Blackwell family at its summer estate, Halcyon, on Lake Michigan. The Blackwells are overwhelming, especially the materfamilias, known as Maj (short for "Her Majesty"). They are classic inbred Wasps, fetishizers of the threadbare...
Curtis Sittenfeld's best-selling debut novel, Prep, dropped a Midwestern girl into an East Coast boarding school, where readers watched her struggle toward adulthood. In her third novel, American Wife (Random House, 576 pages), Sittenfeld raises the stakes: this time, the Midwestern girl ends up in the White House. Readers will recognize Laura and George Bush as the inspiration for Sittenfeld's first couple, Alice and Charlie Blackwell, but it's the author's rich imagination that brings the Blackwells to life. TIME's senior arts editor Radhika Jones spoke to Sittenfeld a few days before the book...
...about the sex in the book? I was reminded of something you said about Prep, that it might not be your parents' cup of tea for various reasons, and the graphic sex was part of that. It's quite a visual, the sex in American Wife...
...read that you didn't expect Prep to get the kind of reception that it did. But American Wife was coming into an environment where it would get a lot of attention precisely because it is so relevant. Was the run-up to publication different? Did it feel different as you were writing...
...problem. Boston's restaurants led the pack with 63 violations among them, most of which had to do with unclean food surfaces; other transgressions included spoiled food and inadequate hand-washing by employees. Austin, Texas, eateries came in second, with 58 violations, including a leaking roof over a food-prep area and rodent droppings on utensils. Most of the city's violations, however, had to do with food kept at improper temperatures...