So, my love affair with Mr. Perrotta started with The Abstinence Teacher. Having seen both Little Children & Election, I was curious to read his work prior to adaptation. Little Children shares A LOT of elements with The Abstinence Teacher: both deal with the lack of satisfaction in suburban family life, both have characters that were once liberal and find themselves losing their identities in the process of "settling" down, and both have characters that are your regular judgmental types with more under the surface than you'd expect.
While I truly did appreciate this book, I still think that Perrotta tackled the subject matter better in The Abstinence Teacher. He is no doubt a master of the omniscient third person POV- but there were a few too many sub plots in Little Children that made me lose my initial connection with the core characters. The story obviously belongs to the affair between two unsatisfied suburbanites (Sara and Todd) as well as the convicted and recently released child molester, Ronnie. While it was interesting to see plots that the movie only touched on flushed out to a fuller degree, I found that there was a bit too much going on for my taste.
The Abstinence Teacher, while having multiple stories and POVs was much easier to connect to the characters. That being said, I must say that the one exception to my sub-plots theory is the character of Mary Ann: an antagonistic suburban wife and mother who is the almost fascist queen of the playground moms. She played a very small part in the movie and just a slightly bigger part in the book, however her final realization at the end of the book is a fascinating one and made me wish that there would have been more focus on her en lieu of some of the others.
I still maintain that Perrotta is one of my new favorite writers in today's literary world, but Little Children didn't quite live up to my first read of his.
B
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