Perrotta, Tom: Little Children

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The main characters of Tom Perrotta's Little Children find themselves, in their early thirties, stuck in imperfect relationships and in life situations that are somehow less than what they had imagined for themselves. Sarah, in her college days a short-haired feminist flirting with lesbianism, is married to an older man, Richard, who failed as a father and husband in his first marriage and is repeating his mistakes in a second. Sarah, though not a bad mother to her three-year-old daughter Lucy, is not fully comfortable with, or competent at, the task of caring for a child. Todd, on the other hand, a square-jawed former athlete whom the other mothers at the playground have dubbed the Prom King, thoroughly enjoys his role as stay-at-home dad. What plagues him is his failure to pass the bar exam, his failure to want to pass it, and his wife's relentless attempts to push him into a career for which he is unsuited. Sarah and Todd meet near the swings, enact a dramatic if unlikely scene for their audience of busybody playground parents, and fall into an affair which they hope will make their lives right. The drama of their relationship and its complications is supplemented by trouble in their town, the arrival of a convicted child molester, who has moved in with his mother after a stint in jail and has his own more extreme problems forming relationships.

Perrotta's novel is about choices--the mate one selects, the children one chooses, or not, to have, the life that results from the small decisions one makes along the way. And it is about relationships, usually dysfunctional romantic relationships, unexpectedly supportive same-sex groups that play or read or pass out flyers together, ties between parents and children. The book is not always successful. The hierarchy of playground mothers, the less powerful personalities under the sway of a spandex-clad, fascistic, supermom, does not ring true. And the children's dialogue, what little there is of it, sounds to my ears more like an adult affecting childish speech than realistic three-year-old language: "Where it went? ...Where my snack?" But sometimes Perrotta gets it just right, as in his description of Todd's contentment with full-time fatherhood:

"Something had happened to him over the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid's day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can't catch up with it, not even if you try."

Little Children builds in suspense as Todd and Sarah's relationship consumes them and as the child molester's demons threaten to overpower him. One fears for the children of the book's title, not so much because of the threat posed by the sex offender in their midst, but because of the harm their own parents' bad decisions may cause. It is a powerful book, worthy of the read.