Bethanne Patrick

Recommended Reading: 'The Abstinence Teacher'
November 8, 2007

Forgive the late posting... I'm traveling...

Our week of Recommended Reading continues! I'm not quite sure what I expected on reading Tom Perrotta's new novel The Abstinence Teacher -- perhaps I was waiting for the sly, cruel humor of Little Children, or the skating-on-the-edge-of-farce feeling I got from Election -- but I got something quite different. It's not that Perrotta isn't funny in this book, or even sometimes farcical, like when a preacher shows up one Sunday with two black eyes and a torn suit -- then introduces the sinner who caused both). I think the closest I can come to explaining the difference between his previous novels and The Abstinence Teacher is that Perrotta has completed his next stage of growing up.

I don't mean that Perrotta wasn't already a grown-up; I mean that like everyone else his maturation and wisdom has stages. In this (again suburban) novel of manners, we meet Ruth Ramsey, a high-school sex education teacher whose frank attitudes are beaten back by the local "abstinence teacher," a consciously sexy twentysomething blonde named JoAnn who seems to mesmerize the men of the administration with every Wise Choice she advocates.

Ruth, a recently divorced mother of two whose gay best friends are bickering about marriage proposals, feels caught in Stonewood Heights and is thrilled to feel a bit of the old frisson when she meets her daughter Maggie's soccer coach, Tim. However, when she discovers that Tim is not just praying with the team, but is a member of The Tabernacle (a local church that meets in an abandoned storefront), she vows to forget about him and concentrate on finding her lost high-school fling, Paul Caruso.

                                                         

Such a simple plot summation for a book that has so many rich layers. Perrotta is incredibly nimble in skipping between perspectives as well as attitudes: when he's describing Ruth's moment of truth in a hotel room, he's as present as he is while explaining why Tim craves the connection and meaning that a fundamentalist church gives to his life. Perrotta never patronizes, and he never takes the easy way out. The Abstinence Teacher reads like the work of a man who is secure in his place in the world.

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on November 8, 2007 | Comments (0)