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Tom Perotta
is sort of an expert on the sordid, Desperate-Housewives-esque,
suburban crime scene. The multi-layered characters and complicated
storyline in The Abstinence Teacher carry the same
compelling and dramatic elements as his 2004 novel, Little
Children.
In this
outing, Perotta seemingly picks up on the other side of town
from where Little Children left off, finding another
intensely flawed but relatively normal set of people unimaginatively
drawn together, defying community expectation. The main player
is Ruth Ramsey, the liberal high-school sex ed teacher who
comes under fire from the town's resident ultra-conservative
church, the Tabernacle, for talking openly about sex and contraception.
Ruth is seemingly at odds with everything in her life. Recently
divorced, she struggles with her desire for fulfillment in
her life and work, as well as with co-raising her two daughters.
Her nemesis
and second player, Tim Mason, is a former small-time junkie
and alcoholic who was most famously left by his gorgeous wife
and daughter at the peak of his drug use, though he is currently
a semi-reformed, church-going, prayer-circle-leading soccer
coach. Tim and Ruth are both encouraged and deterred by their
collective furtive pasts. After berating Tim for leading her
non-spiritual daughter in a team prayer, Ruth and Tim decide
to meet again to discuss the situation, wherein Perotta offers
what is essentially his new narrative game plan. He writes
the following:
The
formula was simple: you brought together a man and a woman
who held wildly divergent worldviews—an idealistic
doctor, say, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer—and
waited for them to realize that their witty intellectual
combat was nothing but a smoke screen, kicked up to conceal
the inconvenient and increasingly obvious fact that they
were desperate to hop into bed with each other.
With
Tim playing doctor and Ruth pinch-hitting as the lawyer, it
is only a matter of time before the story unoriginally curls
to fit this mold. Perotta has moved a good 15 years away from
the plotlines of his earlier books such as Election
and Joe College, in which his characters were young,
strong, and driven by ambition. In The Abstinence Teacher,
Perotta's still relatively young leads and a cast of strong-willed
periphery characters push and pressure the drama when it feels
like Perotta has nothing left to say. Tim's ex-wife and Ruth's
gay best friends, for example, only seem to pop only when
dialogue within either Ruth or Tim's stories seem to go stale;
while the ex-wife at least pits Tim against himself, Ruth's
friends come across distracting and sadly stereotyped.
In Tim,
Perotta has created a guy who can't let go of the idea of
youth. What gets Tim from Point A (the height of his drug
use) to Point B (his becoming an avid church-goer) is the
introduction of Pastor Dennis and the Tabernacle Church, the
uber-right wing religious organization based out of a strip
mall, which is currently in the business of bringing a sort
of strict morality back to suburbia—specifically, hitting
the last nail in Ruth Ramsey's coffin. Perotta's depiction
of Tim and the struggles that he experiences as a man who
genuinely wants to overcome his past but who has trouble with
the straight and narrow is intriguing and authentic. The problem
is that it never goes anywhere; Perotta has all the right
elements without the glue to hold it together.
Perotta
isn't all Sturm and Drang, however; there are moments of true
hilarity that invoke not only sympathy for the characters
but empathy from readers who will no doubt identify with the
unexpected and uncomfortable situations. For encouraging Planned
Parenthood instead of abstinence, for instance, Ruth is sent
to an abstinence "refresher course" (taught by a Virginity
Consultant) where the class (a handful of miscreant teachers)
are asked to share, among other things, a sexual encounter
they regret. While Ruth's fellow teachers brazenly—or
stupidly—confess to one act or another, Ruth finds herself
between a rock and a hard place with no desire to step any
closer toward the restrictive morality line.
What
Perotta boils down in The Abstinence Teacher falls
somewhere between satire and a sort of skewered realism, and
though the characters have compelling beginnings, they hit
the ground running and then trail off, ending weaker than
they started and no better off. If the creamy filling content
had been strong enough to sustain an indifferent ending, Perotta's
end result would've been much more satisfying.
(February,
2009)
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