Lessons from the fall

American novelist and screenwriter Tom Perrotta. (Mark Mainz/Getty)

Tom Perrotta is a man of contradictions. First, there are his looks: the stylish square-framed glasses, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and suit jacket suggest Boston preppie, but his stocky build and swagger give off a tough-guy vibe. Then there’s his reputation: he’s a best-selling author of novels that are not only Hollywood-friendly — Election and Little Children were both made into movies — but have earned him comparisons to Chekhov, Cheever and Updike. His detractors, however, call him a lightweight. A recent review in Esquire opined that Perrotta writes “books for people who don't much like books — satires for nice people, f--- books for prudes. The problem with this approach is that it’s not really satire at all. It’s situational comedy.” Ouch.

But perhaps the most striking contradiction of all is that this chronicler of soured marriages, sexual transgressions and suburban melancholy is a happily married family man who lives in a suburb of Boston. He’s even quick to point out the personal irony that surrounds his new novel, The Abstinence Teacher, a satire about public-school sex education. Although Perrotta is a liberal, hipster dad who writes extensively and elaborately about sex, he’s never tackled the subject with his own kids, aged 10 and 13.

“I’m one of those great hypocrites,” he says, during an interview in the atrium of the CBC Broadcasting Centre in Toronto. “I’m so glad my kids are learning it at school so I don’t have to talk about it with them. I got none from my parents, I got none at school, I got it all from idiots on the playground.”

In The Abstinence Teacher, Ruth, a divorced, liberal sex-ed instructor becomes the target of a local church’s morality squad after she blithely responds to a student’s question about oral sex. “Some people like it,” she tells the kid. Humiliated and infuriated by the ensuing controversy, she spearheads a campaign against her daughter’s soccer coach Tim — a druggie and rocker turned born-again Christian — after he leads the team in a spontaneous prayer.

Like Perrotta, the novel is full of contradictions. Pro-sex Ruth hasn’t had a date in years, and one of the book’s most erotically adventurous characters is a devout Christian wife. Tim, meanwhile, is no simple-minded zealot, but a strikingly sympathetic mess, a man who’d like to do right if only he could figure out what exactly that is.

Similar to 1998’s Election, which was inspired by the 1992 U.S. presidential race between George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the idea for The Abstinence Teacher was sparked by the 2004 election, in which Democrat John Kerry lost to incumbent George W. Bush.

“Bush should have lost,” Perrotta says. “The war was already unpopular. He had already alienated a lot of independent voters. The perception was that he had been put over the top by evangelical-values voters in swing states like Ohio, who were mainly concerned with gay marriage. It seemed amazing to me that given that we were in a troubling war, that this was what it all came down to. Everyone I knew kept asking, ‘Who are these evangelical-values voters?’”

(Random House Canada)

“And like Ruth, I felt like these people had taken over. They were determining the future of [my] country. I felt like one responsibility a novelist has is to understand the culture that he or she lives in. In the novel, I wanted to represent this culture war in a microcosm. I thought that sex ed was a good way to approach it because everyone has a sex life and everyone has values. What’s interesting is the degree to which our values and our behaviours actually match up. That territory is so ripe for fiction — that space between our public avowals and our private behaviour.”

That territory is the setting for the best of Perrotta’s fiction. While The Abstinence Teacher isn’t a sequel to 2004’s Little Children — a survey of Generation X’s bumpy and occasionally tragic transition into adulthood, marriage and parenting — the new book reads like a companion piece.

“We’re living in the wake of dashed hopes,” says the 46-year-old author. “I went to college in the 1980s and it was not uncommon for me to have female friends who weren’t sure that they were going to get married, but if they did, they wanted to have a job and their husbands were going to do their share around the house. There was the sense that it was incumbent upon us to reinvent marriage and family. Twenty years later, I went to my reunion and many of those women were in much more traditional relationships than they had expected. Some were fine with that, but with some, there was a sense that they had betrayed themselves and who they once were.

“If you’re one of Betty Friedan’s housewives, you can be liberated. But if you’re one of the housewives who has made choices that have left you trapped, well, that’s something else. In a way, it’s much more depressing. It’s strange to have watched that feminist moment — and it really was a moment — pass.”

The Abstinence Teacher, which Perrotta is currently adapting into a screenplay for Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, reflects a similar moment in contemporary American life. Though the religious pitch of the 2004 election that inspired the book has cooled, Perrotta’s examination of the divide between the secular and the religious still feels timely.

“Among the Republicans, there’s a sense that the culture wars are over,” Perrotta says, pointing out the sex scandals that have embarrassed the Republican party and the recent snubbing of a debate sponsored by Christian groups by the leading Republican presidential candidates. “It’s just bad politics for them right now. The real enemy and the real issue is the Middle East. I do think the Republicans remain committed to an apocalyptic us-versus-them world view. It’s just that for a long time, it was the liberals who were them, and right now, it’s the Islamists.”

For such a political junkie, Perrotta isn’t as inspired by the upcoming election as he has been in the past. He says that like a lot of liberals, he’s deflated by the war in Iraq (“to me, the only argument for staying there is that we’ve created such a mess that we’re responsible for helping to clean it up”) and the failings of the Democratic party. He is adamant, however, that a Democrat should be elected in 2008. He won’t name the candidate he’s backing, but he fesses up to a certain fascination with Hillary Clinton.

“I’m surprised by how resilient she is. I argued with people a year ago that she was unelectable because people disliked her so intensely. I’m starting to think that she’s terrifying to the Republicans because they’ve used their big guns on her many times and they just don’t know how to destroy her. She looks like Superman to them: she just keeps walking as the bullets go bouncing off.”

As for America’s domestic divide, he is much more optimistic. “I was able to find, in this story, some common ground. Even though the two main characters have different belief systems and values, they live in the same community and grew up in the same culture. And maybe there’s grounds for hope for all of us in finding out we might have much more in common than we ever realized.”

The Abstinence Teacher is published by Random House and is in stores now.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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