Suburbanites acting on instinct

LITTLE CHILDREN

By Tom Perrotta

St. Martin’s, $24.95, 355 pages

REVIEWED BY MARK R. CHESHIRE

It’s difficult to decide which is more irresistible: Tom Perrotta’s new novel “Little Children,” or the impulse the book inspires to scour that barely-opened college philosophy textbook on the bookshelf for the meaning of life.

Mr. Perrotta’s compelling characters do the darnedest things. Sarah, a feminist lesbian turned heterosexual wife and mother, has sex with Todd, a relative stranger and co-adulterer, on the 50-yard line of a football field (artificial turf, no less). Larry Moon, Todd’s football teammate, pursues a pedophile new to the community with the obsession of Ishmael chasing after Moby Dick.

And this is just a small sampling. There are another half dozen or so vividly drawn characters engaging in curious behavior.

As diverse as the people in Mr. Perrotta’s suburban neighborhood are, they have one integral characteristic in common. They act without much, if any, premeditation. Motivation bubbles up unexpectedly from unknown places and goes unscrutinized, at least until it’s too late.

In the opening scene of the book, Sarah articulates the novel’s theme, although we don’t necessarily realize it at the time — which is appropriate, considering that the characters rarely understand what they’re up to, either.

After trying to convince herself that she’s nothing like the boring suburban women with whom she spends her days at the playground as their children gambol, Sarah finally concedes that she’s become one of them, but only by accident. She describes her descent into both marriage and motherhood as “a moment of weakness.”

But she follows this surprising explanation with an even more surprising exoneration of herself. What is “adult life,” she muses, “but one moment of weakness piled on top of another?”

Moments after Sarah has this revelation, the toothsome father referred to as the “Prom King” by the group of mothers makes his way to the swing set, his son in tow.

The women coo. They tell Sarah that the Prom King hasn’t been to the park in some time, which made it easier on all of them. When he was coming regularly, they all had to put effort into their appearance, although no one ever screwed up the courage to approach him.

Sarah is bet five dollars by one of the diffident mothers that she can’t get the Prom King’s phone number. She does, and much more. After a moment of conversation, the two kiss, passionately, and in so doing set the novel in motion.

The Prom King, or Todd, a stay-at-home dad, and his son Aaron rendezvous with Sarah and her daughter Lucy every day at the community pool. A rainstorm eventually forces them indoors and the adults into bed, which is where they remain, basically, throughout the summer.

In the evenings, Todd lives a ruse, and not just because he’s having an affair. His wife, Kathy, is ready to live the American dream, and she expects Todd to deliver what’s missing. She’s got the beautiful child and attractive husband, the successful career and the house in a respectable suburb. Now she wants Todd to provide more material comfort.

He has twice failed the bar exam. This fact invariably prompts others to console Todd with the observation that John F. Kennedy, Jr., also struggled with the exam. “Little Children” is teeming with dark and smart humor, like this touch:

“Todd felt the twinge of sympathy he never failed to experience when people mentioned JFK Jr. in an attempt to make him feel better,” Mr. Perrotta writes. “It was bad enough that the poor guy had to lose his father and die in a tragic plane crash; did he have to go down in history as the patron saint of failed bar exams, as well?”

Needing to get out of the house to focus, Todd goes to the local library every night to study. The problem is that he spends little time with the books, preferring to stand outsideand watch a group of young boys skateboarding.

He obviously has no desire to be a lawyer, and late in the novel heconfesses that the reason he went to law school stems exclusively from a night of tequila-drinking. Over shots, a friend, not wanting to take the admissions exam on his own, asked Todd to accompany him. Todd agreed, did well on that test, entered and then graduated from law school — and then failed the bar. Once again, a major life decision depends on nothing more than a moment of weakness.

If Mr. Perrotta stopped here, he might justifiably be categorized as a writer of “lad” fiction — superficial writing fixated on sex and little else.

But he doesn’t. In the opening sequence when Sarah thinks that life is a succession of weak moments, her brain keeps going: “Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.”

Clearly, the novel is about people being disobedient in the name of happiness. Walking the path well-worn is easy and neat. It requires no thought. Making and taking your own path is difficult and fraught with possibilities for failure. It demands the intrepid to make decisions on instinct, decisions that, in hindsight, sometimes look like giving up.

Mr. Perrotta, who used to teach creative writing at Harvard, also gives book lovers a delicious juxtaposition. He has Sarah attend a book club where the novel under discussion is “Madame Bovary.” When she read it in college, Sarah dismissed it as typical of repressive male writing. But upon rereading it, Sarah considers Emma Bovary — an adulterer in a situation not unlike her own — to be “beautiful and heroic in her rebellion.”

Since readers have been fighting over this for more than a century, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Sarah is right. But of one thing I am certain. Mr. Perrotta’s novel is more entertaining than any dusty old philosophy textbook, and just as provocative.

Mark R. Cheshire is editor in chief of The Daily Record newspaper in Maryland.