A- | Little Children: A Novel

Big Children | Little Children: A Novel | Tom Perrotta

books:


	• Little Children: A Novel Tom Perrotta St. Martin's Griffin, 2005 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 238 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

YES, BEING A GROWN UP CAN BE HARD!

Those women you see in the park, the ones with the bleached-white tennis shoes and daughters who have ponytails so tight they make my head hurt, ARE having thoughts you'd never imagine! Who wouldn't want to make out with the hot dad pushing his kid on the swing?!
I suppose the thing that makes us adults and not children is our ability to see beyond our urges and recognize the consequences our actions can have. This is the story of people who try to break out of the life they've ended up with, people who give in to their most profound desires. To witness the unraveling of each character's life is both horrifying and hilarious. It will make you sad, but you'll be smiling the whole way.

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A-

The title itself brings so many different layers to a lush suburban landscape that is brushed with all the right levels of satire, sincerity, humor, and melodrama. While the subject itself isn't anything profound, it is the storytelling technique and the usage of the backstory to explain the characters' present motives that pulls the novel out of the depths of obscurity. Perrotta is skillful at getting into the minds of desperate people in desperate marriages, giving honesty to a genre that could have been filled with caricatures. Some of the comments the author makes about the circumstances of the book are breathtakingly dead-on. The story lags in the latter half of the second part, but by the time you get to the third part, Perrotta has found his niche and the reader is left with overwhelming and indescribable emotions. In a stroke of genius, parallelism from Part One is brought to the final act, bringing the narrative to a full circle - and close. Who are the little children? This ultimate question is up for debate, and is part of the true magic that Perrotta brings to the literary scene.

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Big Children

Tom Perrotta is a master of realism. A few of the blurbs on the inside cover refer to Little Children as "satirical," but I haven't ever read anything that better describes the normal lives of normal people while keeping entertainment a part of the process (See Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for realism that seems to be almost wielded against the reader).

Perrotta has been cranking out successful, easy to read novels for 10 years. He broke onto the nationwide best seller list with Election which was later turned into an Oscar nominated movie. After the moderately successful Joe College, Little Children has received even more sales and accolades than Election.

Little Children begins with Sarah, mother of two year-old Lucy, struggling to fit into the role of stay at home mom. This transformation from college intellectual to unexpected mother is only made more difficult by the marriage that she's trapped in with Richard. Richard's biggest problem with the marriage is that he's in love with a porn star he has never met named "Slutty Kay."

While watching her daughter play at the park, Sarah meets Todd, a handsome, married, law school graduate that has failed the bar exam twice. He's a hundred thousand dollars worth of indecision. He tells his wife almost every night that he is going to the library to study for the bar. Instead, he goes to a skate park and watches teenagers skateboard. An amalgamation of dissatisfaction and idleness draws the two into a passionate affair while the rest of the town obsesses about a newly released child sex offender who many suspect to have gotten away with murdering a little girl.

The novel revolves around Sarah and Todd trying to understand what their new romance means. Is it just a fling? Should they leave their significant other? Should their children's likely future unhappiness factor into a decision that could possibly make their own lives less miserable?

There wasn't a single likeable character in Little Children. The reason for this is that Perrotta did his job extremely effectively. I personally think that barely anybody would like anyone if we knew all of the selfish, devious things that constantly run through each others minds, especially the minds of middle-aged, middle class people who are under whelmed with how their life turned out. Instead, compassion is conjured in all of the places Perrotta designed it to and likewise derision where he intended it to appear. This novel expertly shows why the inability to know every thought in someone's head is what allows us to manage having relationships.

I feel a similar dislike for characters in Chuck Pahlaniuk books, but he doesn't ever manage to stir up any compassion for his characters. Obviously, Little Children is at a different level than Pahlaniuk's books because Chuck ratchets up the disgusting character flaws quite a bit, but I think that's the point. Perrotta mixes selfishness with the longing for human understanding in his characters in realistic harmony.

When I was little, I remember seeing families breaking apart. When I heard about affairs that people were having I would think, "Why are these people doing this? Can't they see how much pain they're causing?" If you've ever wondered something similar and came away without a full-fleshed answer, read this book.

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Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm.

They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen-at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Perrotta's previous novels, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.

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