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Summary: Powerful story that moved me to tears
Review: Excellent book. The story of molestation and parent/child relationships and interactions. I was moved to tears on sevearl occasions. Took my breath away at times to read some scenes. I recommend this one.
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Summary: No Moral Compass in Land of Suburban Children
Review: What made the 1999 film Election, based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, was the way we saw suburban, middle-class characters suffering the disparity between their grand aspirations and their unfulfilled longings as they languished in their miserable marriages, their hellish sense of loneliness, and their personal frustration as they never lived up to whatever excitement, career success, and romance they believed they deserved in their lives. Now comes Perrotta's novel The Little Children, which in many ways is even more ambitious and relevant social commentary than his entertaining novel Election. Like the stories of John Cheever, Perrotta's novel shows that there is no suburban Eden. It is rather a place seething with infantile lusts, narcissism, arrested emotional development, and all kinds of tomfoolery that keep the novel from taking itself too seriously. For all the serious subject matter, this novel departs from Cheever in terms of tone. Whereas Cheever deals with suburban ennui with somberness and subtle irony, Perrotta prefers the comic romp. We see Todd, unhappily married to a wife who dotes on her child at the expense of giving her husband any attention, leaving him sexually starved. We see Sarah, from another marriage, who, failing as a professor of women's studies and working in a Starbuck's, marries for reasons of financial security and convenience and ends up having an affair with Todd whom she meets at the park playground where many adults take their kids to play. Perhaps the most grotesque character who comes close to being a cartoon figure is busy-body Larry, a macho retired cop who, bored with his early retirement, intrudes on the life of a released sex criminal, becoming in many ways more of a nuisance than the pariah who infests the neighborhood. The scenes where Larry pressures the namby-pamby Todd to play hardcore park football with Larry's Marine buddies is hilarious and gives the novel, which is so full of many sobering themes about dysfunctional suburbia, great comic relief. As many have said, The Little Children is about adults who wear a mask of bravado and assuredness to conceal that behind all their middle-class trappings and domestic comforts, they are little more than frightened children who, without a moral compass, have lost their way.
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Summary: "Repetition that goes with boredom becoming a kind of peace"
Review: Perrotta has crafted a sly tale of children trapped in adult bodies, coming to terms with their repetitive and incomprehensible lives. The novel begins and ends in a playground, but it's not the children that's the focus, but the adults who are acting like children. Tom Perrotta did a marvelous job of seducing us with Election - a quirky, black comedy, in which he exposes the dark side of human behavior. Now, with Little Children, he offers up a damning assessment of human relationships, and exposes the boredom and frustration that may lie at the heart of "average" suburban lives. The novel centers on the chance meeting of Todd, the handsome, sexy stay-at-home-dad nicknamed "The Prom King" with Sarah, a trendy, one-time feminist, who has become trapped in a sexless, conventional marriage to Richard, an older man. The kiss that Sarah unwittingly smacks on Todd at the local playground, leads to a desperate, highly sexual, and clandestine affair, which in turn has ramifications for their marriages that neither of them could have anticipated. There's also an effective subplot involving the arrival in the neighborhood of a convicted child molester, which presents some of the characters, particularly Larry, an ex-cop, with a quite challenging moral dilemma. With all this subversive and duplicitous behavior, Perrotta never judges his characters; he sees them as basically nice people trapped by their own inertia but at the same time honest about their lot and stage in life. Little Children is whimsical, light-hearted and amusing, and Perrotta achieves this tone by developing his characters emotions in potent and surprising ways. Todd, the father of a new born son "begins to suspect that there was something not quite right, something unresolved and defective at the core of his being," and he thinks of the thrill, and electrical current filling him with a conviction that a life with Sarah, is not only possible but absolutely necessary. There's Sarah's husband, Richard, sending away for mail order pornography, at war with his own desires, and loosing in the end. And then there's Todd's husband, Kathy, a documentary filmmaker, beautiful, gorgeous, and frustrated at Todd's unwillingness to re-enter the workforce. There are some wonderfully funny moments in Little Children: In one scene during a local church service, Larry, irreverently pulls Ronnie, the child molester's pants down to the chagrin of the other worshipers. And in another scene, when Sarah goes to a meeting to discuss the adulterous aspects of Madame Bovery, the subject keeps returning to illicit sex. Perrotta desperately wants us to like his characters in all their passivity and honesty; but frustration always lurks underneath, and the result is a narrative that creeps up on you and builds in intensity. Little Children is a tremendously entertaining and unexpectedly vigorous novel, which should provide the reader with many hours of reading pleasure. Mike Leonard April 04.
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Summary: Perrotta Scores a Win with Little Children
Review: (...)LITTLE CHILDREN is a great read. In fact, it's probably the best I have read in the past year. LITTLE CHILDREN focuses on small town suburbia and a cast of unhappy 30-somethings going through the motions of their lives. With the return of a resident who has served time for sexual assualt the community is on alert. The more prominent storyline is that of Sarah and Todd, two people caught in marriages and lives they hadn't pictured for themselves. Together they attempt to create a better one and you will have to read the book to find out whether or not they are successful. Despite the darker story lines of adultery, and the returning sex offender, Perrotta has written a story that will make you laugh, perhaps even out loud. Yes, you will also cringe at times, and you may also readily identify with many of the people featured in the book. People who live on two different canvases - painting a bright picture for outsiders to see, while painting something entirely different when supposedly no one is else looking. Perrotta brings us in to see what is going behind closed doors. Perrotta has a knack for writing in a very engaging way and that makes for a really satisfying and quick read. I haven't read any of Perotta's other work, but LITTLE CHILDREN will be changing that.
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Summary: A Scathing Novel that Lampoons Suburbia
Review: It's all too easy to poke fun at the shallowness and sprawl of modern suburbia, its cookie-cutter homes, impeccable lawns and armadas of gas-guzzling SUVs. So when a writer comes along with a fresh, sharp satire that casts suburbia in a new fluorescent light without dredging up the same old tired complaints, it's truly something to get excited about. Tom Perrotta's LITTLE CHILDREN is just that: a scathing novel that lampoons suburbia and captures a particular moment in the very recent past with such knowing detail and verve that it risks seeming outdated before the paperback is even published. Regardless, it has such a keen insight into the emotional lives of its characters and their world that it should stand as representative of the early '00s for many years to come. LITTLE CHILDREN is set in a Boston suburb called Bennington, the land of the supermom, "a tiny, elaborately made-up woman who dressed in spandex workout clothes, drove an SUV the size of a UPS van, and listened to conservative talk radio all day." Sarah, the novel's main character, is not a supermom, however; she considers herself an outsider, better educated, highly opinionated and openly liberal. But she is cowed by a life of sexual confusion and safe choices that have led to a marriage with a much older man she doesn't love and a demanding three-year-old daughter named Lucy. Feeling "trapped in Kidworld," she has to remind herself constantly "to think like an anthropologist. I'm a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself." The behavior of these "boring suburban women" includes mooning over a mysterious, chiseled stay-at-home dad who brings his three-year-old son to the neighborhood playground. In truth, Todd is supposed to be studying for his third attempt at the bar exam, but he spends his days playing with Aaron and his evenings watching a gang of teenage skateboarders practicing moves on the front steps of the public library. Of the gaggle of moms at the playground, only Sarah --- plain-looking, out of shape and with a frazzled, frizzy head of hair --- has the nerve to talk to him, and their first encounter sparks a steamy affair. With their children napping upstairs, they make love downstairs, seeming to locate in each other everything their lives are lacking: "there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body." Sarah and Todd's relationship allows them to transcend outside the constraints of their lives for a few short, happy moments before the world crashes back in on them. Perrotta weaves into this romance a few subplots --- Sarah's feud with a smug supermom, her husband's addiction to an Internet porn site, Todd's midnight football team --- that give the novel added depth and texture. Best of these is the arrival of Ronnie McGorvey, a convicted child molester and possible murderer who moves in with his mother, setting off a crisis among the "decent people" of Bennington. Neither defending nor vilifying Ronnie, Perrotta presents him as simply human and fallible, maladjusted but at least trying to be a good son, and his presence raises moral issues that dramatically increase the emotional and satirical impact of the story. What makes LITTLE CHILDREN more than just satire are the immediately recognizable and sympathetic characters like Sarah, Todd and Ronnie, who bristle against the constraints and compromises of suburban life, who realize they "can either accept a life of misery or struggle against it." Perrotta understands the attraction to the suburbs, the comforting, mindless security, both financial and social, that for so many people represent the American Dream. That he manages to find new ways to expose the superficiality of this lifestyle makes LITTLE CHILDREN an edgy, hilarious read; that he does so without belittling his characters or denying their investment in their community makes it remarkably memorable well beyond the moment it documents. --- (...)
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Summary: Summer delight
Review: A copy of this book should be included with every sale of a beach bag or sunscreen! Dive in and be enveloped in its cool depths with regret only that autumn and the end of the story will arrive too soon. This is not to categorize the book as a "beach book", shallow and slight. The insights into the inner landscapes of the characters are profound and amusing, poignant and tart. I did not think I could enjoy a Perrotta book more than "The Wishbones" but here it is. Yes, Massachusetts has Capes Cod and Ann and the Berkshires, but our finest human resources are Tom Perrotta and Elinor Lipman, masters of modern fiction.
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Summary: Suburban Intrigue
Review: Another good book from Tom Perrotta. I've read all his books--- just bought his "Bad Haircut" and am looking forward to reading it now. The cast of characters in "Little Children" are people that we all have known--- but we were not clever enough to write a book about them! Perrotta is a great observer of the human condition and depicted these have-it-all suburbanites and their lives perfectly in this satire. Every one is dissatisfied and is looking for a way out of their current situation.....they have all seemingly arrived at the current time in their lives by following the paths of least resistance or by accident, or both. They all seem to take the easy way out, as though they have no moral choice. The characters are self-important and self-absorbed and let the reader know that they are doing the most important job in the world, bringing up children. I happen to agree that this is the most important job, but there is a right way and an obnoxious way to make this point. Despite the way he skewers his characters, you can tell that Perrotta is really fond of them, and he manages to get the reader to take an unbiased look at even the one who deserves our consideration in the least. To do this requires a delicate balancing act, one that Perrotta seems to have mastered.
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Summary: It was SO much better than Madam Bovary . . .
Review: Tom Perrotta's wry and bouncy expose of suburban life had me constantly recognizing people I knew, and even aspects of my own character. Who among us doesn't know a mother like Mary Ann, the perfect mom who never forgets to bring a snack to the park? And who cannot relate to the feelings of inferiority and weirdness felt by Sarah, the former feminist turned stay-at-home mom? Even the children reminded me of people I knew (particularly Aaron, the little boy obsessed with repeat viewings of "Thomas and the Magic Railroad." Peter Fonda psychodramas indeed!). Perrotta expertly conjures up his characters, each of whom has some tragic flaw. Mary Ann is so organized that she can't have any fun; Todd, although well-meaning and certainly hunky, is the embodiment of apathy; Kathy, the beautiful documentary-maker, wants to make her husband into something he will never be; and Richard -- well, what can you say about a man who orders used panties over the internet? Perrotta creates his characters and lets them have at each other, which they do with amoral abandon. Other characters were less compelling. Larry Moon and Ronald McGorvey, a bad cop and a child molester respectively, seemed out of place in this novel about suburban life. Wasn't there enough evil lurking in the failing marriages of Todd and Kathy, Sarah and Richard, without adding a weird subplot? It was as though Perrotta had crossed an Updike novel with a Sebold novel. And given all of the animosity that passed between Moon and McGorvey in particular, the ending, which I will not reveal, seemed a little too surreal. But this is to nitpick. Rarely have I enjoyed a novel as much as I enjoyed "Little Children." Reading Perrotta is like listening to good stand-up comedy; both the comedy and the novel succeed by eliciting and exploiting a little shock of recognition.
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Summary: Little Children
Review: I loved this book. It is funny, thought provoking, and believable. The characters are well developed and while some are truly "characters", you say to yourself as you are reading the book that people like this really do exist. The ending was fantastic, one of the best endings in a book that I can remember. I was the first to read this and now it is going through my family - wife and two twentysomething daughters. It's a keeper.
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Summary: Disappointing!!!
Review: If Perrotta's goal was to create characters who are shallow and selfish that you loathe by the end of the last page, the man is simply brilliant! I kept thinking the whole time that the author was developing the wrong characters. Maybe I'm just atypical..but this was not anything like MY transition into adulthood. I thought the book was as shallow and predictable as its characters....excluding the last 25 pages or so. Here's a real challenge...how about a book that TRULY deals with transition into adulthood...young adults trying to figure out how they got to where they are, all the while struggling to do what's right and live up to the choices they've made. I guess that's too much to ask. Don't let the major reviews fool you...this is not that book. Oh, I also didn't find this book as comedic as I did disturbing. I did not have a single laugh-out-loud moment with this book. I didn't find a bit of it funny in the least.
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