First, a confession: I saw the movie before I read the book. Which is amazing, considering what I now know about Tom Perrotta, namely, that he's a smooth writer with a gift for weaving verse together that flows by effortlessly. He's an acclaimed author whose books have been made into successful movies, namely Election. And he even lives in Cambridge, right in my back yard!
Now, as good as the movie was - and it was a solid flick, mainly because of Kate Winslet (she makes any movie she's in worth seeing) - but it's a Hollywood movie, so what you get in the movie - which, by the way, was adapted by Perrotta, so it's about as close to the book as you'll get in a movie version - is a stylized version of the book. Let me give you one example. This is how Sarah, the main character, is described in the book: "her sharp-featured, not-quite-pretty face, her less-than-stunning body." p. 145. Now realize that this person is played in the movie by Kate Winslet, who by any stretch of the imagination is an unattractive woman, and you realize where this'll take you.
Having said that, Little Children as a novel is a fantastic little book. It starts off with a bang, introducing Sarah, a house mom who isn't quite sure how she came to be a suburban mom with a two and a half year old daughter and a husband that she doesn't really connect with and rarely sees. The other main character is Todd, nicknamed "The Prom King" by the other adoring suburban moms at the playground, a good looking high-school quarterback who watches his own young child during the day while he spends the night unsuccessfully attempting to study for the bar exam for the third time while his knockout wife - a documentary director - pays the bills. The two of them hit it off immediately and spend the rest of the summer having an affair while trying to deal with the chaos that this involves in the rest of their lives.
There are other plots as well, mainly one where Todd joins up in a football league with Larry, a hot-headed ex-cop who spends his days stalking Ronnie, a man recently released from prison for indecent exposure and who is suspected in the disappearance of young girl. These plots all weave around the main thread of Todd and Sarah, although they do come together at the end for a conclusion that I find much more satisfyingly morally ambiguous then the movie ending (in Hollywood, every transgression gets punished).
Perrotta obviously knows this terrain, because so many of his observations are insightful and deadly accurate: he's got a good sense of the dreams and fantasies that lurk beneath the placid surfaces of many suburban foax and how - irrationally so - they influence our actions. The way he describes and analyzes these barely acknowledged let alone understood unconscious needs and desires with his relaxed prose makes for a really educational and enjoyable read. He also develops an extremely accurate mood: you really do get the sense you are experiencing a lazy humid summer where the days stretch on and on endlessly...
It all brews together in a good-tasting brew that will give you a pleasantly mild buzz. It's a great read, and highly quotable, and here's a typical sample: "After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? 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." p.9
(Note: Below are some comments about the ending of the book, so if you don't want it spoiled, stop reading now.)
His plot, with one big exception, is depressingly realistic: Sarah ends up a single mom, completely unprepared for it and somewhat estranged from her daughter, while the two men in her life get to do what they want (with other, more beautiful women, natch). Although even when depicting what to a neutral observer would seem like typical boorish male behavior, Perrotta keeps everyone human; he emphasizes how, when planning to run away with Sarah, Todd's big regret is leaving his kid. This is a nice, accurate touch; for too much of the book the kids are forced to the background when, to me, it seems like would they play a much large role that they do - being the father of a young child myself, I can testify to the fact that they're hard to leave behind!
As for the ending, I can't say that it really added up for me. (I will say that with its moral ambiguity, it was a thousand times better then the movie version.) Basically, people make some decisions and/or act in ways that are contrary to what they had been doing the entire book. For example, the "bitch from hell" Mary Ann suddenly reappearing, with a sympathetic background never touched upon when she was the evil super-mom of the playground and reading group, to round out the group of losers Sarah finds herself suddenly a part of. I also don't really understand Todd's reasons behind his ditching Sarah after he (on purpose?) gets hurt skateboarding. He claims that "What he loved most about Sarah was how beautifully she fit into his old one, distracting him from his imperfect marriage and the tedious obligations of child care, supercharging the dull summer days with a sweet illicit thrill." p. 350. This directly contradicts so much of what he said and thought earlier, like when he couldn't see her for a week, or when Perrotta writes "Todd had always been disturbed by the idea of elderly people making love, their droopy, liver-spotted bodies, the hair sprouting from where it shouldn't, the wayward odors, the unpleasant proximity to death. ... But sometimes, when he was making love with Sarah, ... he'd believe for a moment that he could happily fuck her when they were both eighty-five and toothless, that the way their bodies looked was somehow beside the point." p. 146. Given all this, and the way that Perrotta has Kathy, Todd's wife, calmly seducing her husband to stay with her - Kathy's moral alarm from the dinner party where she becomes aware of the affair conveniently absent... the pieces just don't add up for me. But perhaps this is the logic of affairs, that they have their own lifecycle (at least in the eyes of the male), I don't know. All I know is that I can't escape the feeling that Perrotta didn't quite know how to end the story and so simply ended it. And, again, sometimes this is just how life works. Perhaps Todd didn't realize his own motivations until the fall off of the skateboard knocked this knowledge into him. Either way, the ending, even though it doesn't sit well with me, it doesn't detract from the story as a whole, I just think it could have been much better.
Back to TGM's Musings