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March 29, 2005

Little Children by Tom Perrotta

I just finished Little Children, the latest novel by Tom Perrotta. Perrotta is one of the few contemporary novelists whose voice rings completely true to me - no postmodern fireworks, no MFA hyper-refinement, just clean, candid, slightly wry prose. The writer he most reminds me of is Nick Hornby, and if you're a fan of High Fidelity, you're sure to enjoy Perrotta's The Wishbones.

I first stumbled across Perrotta's first book, Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, in an airport bookstore. I have no idea what it was doing there, but it was an instantly compelling series of snapshots of childhood life. The Wishbones, his first novel, is a wonderful story about a musician grappling with the reality that he's never going to be a rock star and may have to settle for domestic stability. The film The Wedding Singer, which came out shortly after the book, has so much in common with the book that I've always wondered if it's more than coincidence. Perrotta's next novel, Election, was filmed by Alexander Payne, and featured Reese Witherspon's breakout performance. I've always preferred the book, actually - it's just as funny, but a little more generous and less smirky than the movie. The one Perrotta book I haven't read is Joe College. All Perrotta's books hit close to home, but this one was a little too close - it's about life as a Yale student in the 1980s, drawn from Perrotta's own experiences. (I went to Yale from 1987-1991, missing Perrotta by a couple of years, I think.) I'll probably get back to it at some point, but reading it felt just too uncomfortably familiar when I first picked it up. I had the same reaction when I tried to read Nelson George's novel about working as a struggling rock critic in New York.

Perrotta's great subject is arrested adolescence (or, in the case of Bad Haircut, just adolescence) - the way the imprint of our high school identities continues to structure our lives into our thirties (and perhaps beyond). Little Children extends that theme into parenthood. The protagonists in Little Children are parents who still don't feel like adults. Todd is a stay-at-home dad who's studying to pass the bar exam, but gradually realizes he likes hanging out with his kid and doesn't really want to be a lawyer. He starts skipping out on his studying to watch the local kids skateboard and play in a midnight football league. Sara is a mom who stumbled into marriage and parenthood in a post-college daze, never able to recapture the sense of community she felt in her years at the school's women's center. They start an affair when they meet at their childrens' playground.

The rest of the plot involves a convicted child molester who moves back home to the neighborhood on his release from prison, and the community's response. That stuff drives the narrative forward, and allows Perrotta to play the parents' fears for their children off their own desires for happiness and escape. But it's a little too sensationalist, and distracts from the observation of everyday suburban detail that's the heart of the book. There are amazing little set-pieces where Perrotta captures the social dynamics of: playground moms competing over mothering skills; ex-jocks taking a "touch" football game a little too seriously; and book clubbers debating the sexual practices described in Madame Bovary (specifically, whether a vague reference to a "shameful" sexual act implies that she has anal sex).

Perrotta's also great on the weirdness of kid culture. Sara, for example, is amazed that her kid is so transfixed by the Thomas the Tank Engine movie, a debacle starring Peter Fonda, Alec Baldwin, and a bunch of animated trains. She observes that her child would gladly watch it every night, "despite its art-house pacing and insistent Freudian undertones."

Perrotta's tone usually tends toward the sunny, and the darker hues in this novel have encouraged some critics to hail it as a breakthrough. More likely, he's finally writing about more traditionally literary subjects - Updike territory - and critics are rewarding him. The relief of this book is that writing about suburbia hasn't neutered Perrotta's voice. Rather, it brings out how so many thirtysomething moms and dads still feel like teenage misfits deep inside. And I guess the politics of Perrotta's books are in how he embraces that inner teenager - it's the rebellious teenager inside us that roils against the workaday world, that chafes against the constraints of adult lives constrained by the demands of capitalism and patriarchy. Todd's and Sara's affair is their little rebellion against suburban conformity. Perrotta is also enough of a humanist to not blame the spouses, but rather observe how they chafe against the demands of adulthood, as well. (Compare this generous approach to the misogyny of American Beauty, which celebrates Kevin Spacey's character's embrace of his inner adolescent, but doesn't extend the same sympathy to Annette Benning's character, who's pegged as the enforcer of suburban ideology: capitalist work habits, consumerist conspicuous consumption, patriarchal gender roles, and bourgeois propriety.)

Perrotta, like Hornby, is one of those writers I can imagine growing old with. They're a few years older than me, and they seem to be marking out the terrain of adulthood just as I step into it. As I grow older, I can imagine more of their generational cohort taking shape. I think of it this way: when I was a teenager, the contemporary artists who spoke to me the most were musicians in their twenties, looking back on their adolescent frustrations. There weren't many novelists I could respond to as directly, because there weren't many teen or twentysomething novelists, period. In my twenties, I read a lot of autobiographical cartoonists such as Joe Matt and Chester Brown - bohemian peers who had found a forum to describe lives not very dissimilar from my own grad student life. Now, in my thirties, my generational peers are finally starting to write novels. Novels are no longer just about other people; they're about people like me.

Read too much of that stuff, and it can become solipsism; that's the rabbit hole that made Joe College too dopplegangerish to read. But reading a few writers like Perrotta and Hornby is also intensely reassuring and rewarding.

Posted by tedf at March 29, 2005 05:50 AM

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