Prep Curtis Sittenfeld Picador, 406pp, £12.99 ISBN 0330441264

Arriving, aged 16, at a girls' boarding school in the deepest Home Counties countryside, I didn't know whether to expect pillow-fights and midnight feasts or rampant anorexia and bottles of Smirnoff under the beds. School life was, in fact, an unholy amalgam of Enid Blyton and the tamer bits of Bret Easton Ellis. Secret eccentricities ran wild. My neighbour to the left talked only to the giant snails she bred in a fishtank; the girl to the right practised WWF wrestling moves in the corridor on unwary passers-by.

But one had to be surreptitious about one's peccadilloes - the important thing was to look, sound and behave "right", at least in public. If you didn't, you risked being classed officially as "weird", and chances were that the cool girls on your dorm with the marijuana-leaf posters wouldn't offer you a B&H by the lake after lacrosse practice.

The school and I parted acrimoniously after a month, so my critical take on Curtis Sittenfeld's first novel is not entirely disinterested. Prep details the misadventures of Lee Fiora, a shy girl who wins a scholarship to Ault, an exclusive New England prep - American for "public"; these are no pampered junior darlings - school. Despite Ault's liberal reputation, it is subject to the same Byzantine, un-written list of dos and don'ts as any other school. Amid the clean-cut boys and girls from the Upper East Side or Greenwich, Connecticut, Lee is officially weird or, as this is New England, "dorky". She doesn't have a flowered bedspread or a stereo, she wears high-necked dresses instead of jeans and flip-flops, and, worst of all, she is the daughter of a mattress salesman from South Bend, Indiana - the Ault equivalent of a stray girl from Solihull or Normanton.

Prep, which is organised by semester ("freshman spring", "sophomore fall", and so on), is less like a novel than a vengeful, minutely detailed diary. "I did not act on what I wanted. I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted," Lee says; in keeping with her Midwestern anonymity, Sittenfeld's prose is clear but relentlessly flat. Like Lee, the novel saves all its energies for hoarding and analysing "hidden information" - metaphorical snails and WWF outfits - about her fellow students.

This is a difficult task, as most of them are, at least outwardly, impeccably rich, cool and successful. Where Lee is a dull prairie, the lofty social peaks of Ault are Aspeth Montgomery and Cross Sugarman. Aspeth is a generic rich, blonde, bitchy girl, prancing round her dorm room in her underwear to the Rolling Stones. Cross is "the tallest, coolest guy in our class", and captain of the basketball team. They hold the blue-chip stock - wealth, connections, beauty, popularity - in Ault's social economy. Less fortunate students have to scrap to survive, and some are doomed from the start. By senior year, Sin-Jun, a Korean girl who committed the freshman faux pas of keeping dried squid in her wardrobe, has had a lesbian affair, attempted suicide and left Ault.

Less spectacularly, unpopular Lee claws her way to acceptance by cutting students' hair and, rather unconvincingly, conducting secret senior-year assignations with Cross Sugarman. These come to an abrupt end when she criticises the school's attitude to race, class and, worst of all, money to a New York Times reporter - a deeply uncool breach of Ault etiquette for which she is ostracised by her classmates.

After 400 pages of private misery, Sittenfeld makes a half-hearted stab at a redemptive finale. Well-liked, trendy Darden Pittard muses openly that "black people who live in a white world learn to be careful"; Cross Sugarman reveals that he is - gasp - Jewish. ("Cross was Jewish?" squawks Lee internally. "Never once had this occurred to me. But he was so popular, he was senior prefect.") Everyone, Prep suggests rather tritely, has his or her own invisible flaws and insecurities (including, apparently, race). This would be more convincing if the novel, like Lee, did not buy so unreservedly into Ault's pitiless calculations of individual worth: "Yes, she was rich, but she was also Jewish," says Lee. "She took care of herself, but she simply wasn't that pretty."

This eventually makes Prep an exhausting catalogue of teenage neurosis, rather than a sly boarding-school romp. Lee should have the reader firmly on her side (anyone who wasn't an Aspeth clone would long for the school underdog to bite back), but she is no Holden Caulfield. Sittenfeld's inexhaustible sympathy for her charmless, whingeing narrator blinds Prep to the eccentric comedy of boarding-school life. If, as a 16-year-old, the author had been locked in a room with a video of If - or, better still, the giant snails - Prep might have been sassier, more engaging and less, well, dorky.

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