I discovered Tom Perrotta by accident. I was looking for someone else on the shelves of my library, poking around in the Ps, and there he was. I picked up Little Children because I’d heard of the movie (but never seen it), and when I read the back and realized he’d also written Election, I knew I had to check him out. The writer who invented Tracy Enid Flick bore further investigation.
As it turns out, his style is exactly the type of style I aspire to. I am a huge fan of stories inspired by people living regular lives. I was thinking about this earlier. I really often aspire to write like, say, Alice Munro or Richard Ford, but let’s be real here. I’m not nearly that poetic. I’m not as poetic as Tom Perrotta, either, but his style is much closer to my reality. The people are real, the situations are authentic, and the narrative is filled with wit.
To recap the story briefly: Sarah and Todd, both stay-at-home parents of toddlers, meet one summer. Both are in marriages that have lost their sheen, living lives vastly different than those they expected. Todd is (half-heartedly) working towards passing the bar exam while his film-producer wife is the major breadwinner, and Sarah, married to a middle-aged ad executive, has long given up her dreams of activisim and PhD’s.
They meet at the park one day, when Sarah kisses Todd on a dare (to the horror of the other mothers present). Over that summer they bring their children to play together at the park and pool, and start an affair that offers escape from their less-than-satisfying lives in suburbia. At the same time, Ronnie, a convicted sex offender who has been released from jail, moves in with his mother. His life brushes up against Todd’s and Sarah’s in some unexpected ways, and as with everyone in the story, no one is as they seem from the outside.
Someone pointed out that writing about suburbia is nothing new, and that’s true. But I often think it takes special skill to make us want to read about characters whose lives are so similar to ours. And that’s perhaps what I liked most about Little Children. It takes a darker view of suburbia, yes, but it does it through the eyes of three-dimensional characters.