True Prep...and Brick Throwing

I’ll not offer a review of True Prep. There are other blogs that will surely  take up the subject with enough alacrity and precision for us all. The only thing I’ll say is that I like it, I’m glad I ordered it and I’ll get through it like I did The Preppy Handbook. Cover to cover but in bits here and there…when I want to and certainly, with an expectation of whimsy. Folks, this ain’t Tolstoy.

But over at The Daily Prep, the tribe seems to have a few problems with this thirty years in the waiting, sequel. Here’s what I offered in comment after reading the various well founded and legitimate concerns that people expressed about the book... “I still have my copy of The Preppy Handbook that I bought in 1980. I’ve read it cover to cover so many times by now that I couldn’t begin to guess the number. But I always read it in fits and starts, but cumulatively, ultimately, in its entirety but never straight-thru.

Slightly sardonic—nuanced satire…that’s what the first book was and if I view this one through the same lens, I can’t possibly find this much fault with it. Come on…it’s been thirty years since the first tongue-in-cheek self caricature hit the bookstores.

If you ever viewed The Preppy Handbook as an unimpeachable go-to playbook for how to “be”, then that was your first mistake. It was and is a fun book…nothing more-nothing less. It seems to me that the manifestation of your disappointment in True Prep is really a reflection of taking satire and wit waaaaay too seriously.

Layout and graphics, product pimping, people and places you don’t like…it’s all good. And if the attenuated tribe of genuine Preps are really this rattled, they wouldn't let the world know that they give a damn about this book, much less the first one.”

If I had to select one symbol, a singular bit of iconography to articulate all that’s wrapped up in both The Preppy Handbook and True Prep, it would be Weejuns. An old pair of Weejuns communicates as much about the wearer as a dozen other cues. But I never needed a book to tell me how and when to wear them. And when a book came along that weighed in on such tribal nuances as a pair of loafers, I read it and enjoyed it for what it was…satire.

And so I'll go to Richard Merkin as I close out my True Prep drivel. The whole Prep-Trad-WASP thing, to me, needs to be treated the same way Merkin suggests dressing and painting should be handled…

"Dressing, like painting, should have a residual stability, plus punctuation and surprise. Somewhere, like in Krazy Kat, you’ve got to throw the brick.”

 Here’s to brick throwing.

Onward. A.D.C.(rocs)