Sometimes when I’m on the road I like to read a novel set in that destination. Most of the time I choose the book consciously, but the last time I went to Amsterdam I happened to startThe Museum Guard on the airplane when I realized it was partially set in Amsterdam. It really enhanced both the book and the trip for me. This time, though, I left my small town in Massachusetts and traveled all the way to Amsterdam only to pick up a book that was set in a small town in Massachusetts: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld.

I noticed this book a few months ago. My affection for the prep-school novel is well-entrenched but has diminished with age, and I wasn’t planning on reading it. I saw this book on so many “best-of-2005″ lists, though, that I became intrigued, and faced with a lot of down time and a limited selection, I caved. Plus, I liked the grosgrain belt on the cover design.

I was expecting a sarcastic, satirical Less than Zero-type book, with worldly teenagers partying heartily. Instead, it was a measured story of a midwestern girl, Lee, who gets into an elite school on a scholarship. The cultural aspects of school life are examined in detail — making friends, finding a roommate, parents’ weekend, Carnation Day. It was so innocent that I would have given it, without reservation, to the pre-teen me to read.

The pre-teen me would have loved it; the adult me enjoyed parts of it but was impatient with the heroine, who was so insecure about her perceived lack of status that she wasted four years at school without ever drawing an easy breath or, apparently, learning anything. As Lee rebuffed all social overtures and alienated all her classmates because she didn’t think she was good enough to hang out with them, I muttered to myself, “Come on! Loosen up! Go to a freaking dance for once in your life, you moron!” She never redeemed herself, though. As her school days drew to a close she committed a final act of flamboyant social suicide, and then in a swift denouement, apparently turned out all right in college. The life that had played out as high tragedy during high school was, post-graduation, pretty ordinary after all.

Thus, the novel was startling, but only in that its rhythms were so true to life. There was no rape scene, no deep dark incest secret, no car crash. Girl goes to high school and gets over it. It was a nice change from the usual, but the narrative arc is “the usual” for a reason. I like a little Bildungs in my roman. If I wanted to experience the life of someone who is socially awkward for years on end — for example, someone who thinks that being forced to have dinner out with her colleagues three nights in a row is the business-trip equivalent of the Bataan Death March — well, I would just look in the mirror.