Little Children: A Novel [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Tom Perrotta (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 19, 2006

TOM PERROTTA’s thirtyish 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 at the playground, and his wife, Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son.  And there’s Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she’s become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband, Richard, who is becoming more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The characters in this intelligent, absorbing tale of suburban angst are constrained and defined by their relationship to children. There's Sarah, an erstwhile bisexual feminist who finds herself an unhappy mother and wife to a branding consultant addicted to Internet porn. There's Todd, a handsome ex-jock and stay-at-home dad known to neighborhood housewives as the Prom King, who finds in house-husbandry and reveries about his teenage glory days a comforting alternative to his wife's demands that he pass the bar and get on with a law career. There's Mary Ann, an uptight supermom who schedules sex with her husband every Tuesday at nine and already has her well-drilled four-year-old on the inside track to Harvard. And there's Ronnie, a pedophile whose return from prison throws the school district into an uproar, and his mother, May, who still harbors hopes that her son will turn out well after all. In the midst of this universe of mild to fulminating family dysfunction, Sarah and Todd drift into an affair that recaptures the passion of adolescence, that fleeting liminal period of freedom and possibility between the dutiful rigidities of childhood and parenthood. Perrotta (Election; Joe College; etc.) views his characters with a funny, acute and sympathetic eye, using the well-observed antics of preschoolers as a telling backdrop to their parents' botched transitions into adulthood. Once again, he proves himself an expert at exploring the roiling psychological depths beneath the placid surface of suburbia.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

The eponymous children in this satirical novel are actually adults who, chafing at the burdens of parenthood, try to re-create their unencumbered youth. Sarah, an overeducated young homemaker, likens her tantrum-prone daughter to a "brooding Russian epileptic" out of Dostoevsky, and pines for lost college days of feminism and bisexuality. While her husband orders used panties online, she has furtive sex with a stay-at-home dad whose repeated failure to pass the bar has earned him the contempt of his gorgeous wife. The humor is sometimes cruel, but Perrotta never betrays the complexity of his characters. For all Sarah's sins—neglecting her child, wallowing in romantic delusions—there's something almost brave about her refusal to join the supermoms drilling their toddlers with dreams of Harvard, and about her yearning for more than "a painfully ordinary life."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 2nd edition (September 19, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 031236282X
• ASIN: B001GQ3DS8
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (274 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #191,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

122 of 133 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant and powerful look at modern suburbia. March 13, 2004

By E. Bukowsky HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In Tom Perrotta's latest novel, "Little Children," the author focuses his microscope on the marital problems of suburban mothers and fathers with young children. Thirty-year-old Todd is a former jock and a blonde hunk dubbed "The Prom King" by the playground mothers. He is a stay-at-home dad who takes care of three-year-old Aaron while his gorgeous wife, Karen, works as a documentary filmmaker. Todd has failed the bar exam twice, as his wife reminds him repeatedly, and his prospects of ever becoming the family breadwinner seem dim. Sarah is a college graduate who is stagnating mentally as a stay-at-home mom. Her marriage to her businessman husband, Richard, is in the doldrums.

The other playground mothers watch in horror as Sarah strides up to Todd one day and kisses him the first time that they meet. Sarah arranges to "bump into" Todd and the two forge a strong bond that threatens their fragile marriages.

The characters in this book are out of touch with their spouses, themselves, and, at times, with reality. Although Perrotta's writing is often humorous, this book is not merely a lighthearted satire of suburban mores and modern marriage. There is much ugliness here, mostly centered on the townspeople's horrified reaction when a convicted sex offender moves in with his mother after a stint in prison. One bitter retired ex-cop named Larry engages in a personal vendetta to harass the ex-con and his aged mother. Todd goes along for the ride, and although he verbally protests, he never makes much of an effort to stop Larry from committing his horrible deeds.

"Little Children" is a brilliant and merciless look at the sterility of suburbia and at the dark emotions that threaten the characters' placid and predictable lives. Most of the individuals in this novel are hypocritical, selfish, and immature. Nevertheless, Perrotta is such a gifted writer that he humanizes the characters and makes us care deeply about them. The author implies that even when we grow up and become parents ourselves, in some ways we all remain "little children" inside.

57 of 62 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Superb March 18, 2004

By Elizabeth Hendry VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Tom Perrotta's Little Children is, in a lot of ways, much like those cheese goldfish on the cover of the novel--addictive and easy to swallow. Unlike the goldfish, however, Little Children also contemplates larger issues. Perrotta is a master. Little Children is funny (laugh-out-loud at certain points), engaging, compelling while also being thought-provoking. I finished this book over two weeks ago, yet the characters and their decisions in the novel still haunt me. The main characters, Sarah and Todd, are two thirty-something suburban parents who are, for varying reasons, unhappy with their lives. Todd and Sarah meet at a town playground and from there, the relationship develops and pretty much serves as the unifying thread throughout the novel. Perrotta manages to create well-rounded, flawed characters with a sympathetic eye. We can somehow forgive them for their flaws and mistakes because we can understand why they do what they do. Little Children is truly an enjoyable and satisfying read--a rare thing. The ending is terrific. I thought there were one of two things that could happen at the end, and I wasn't sure which I preferred. Perrotta had a different idea and took the characters in another direction (a believable one) entirely. I recommend this novel very highly.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Having affairs with boring people May 17, 2004

By Gulley Jimson

Format:Hardcover

I've always been curious about what it must feel like for people who still consider themselves young to have children and settle into suburbia, into a life that just a few years earlier they would have thought bland and unexciting. Considering how widespread the experience of "settling down" is for people of a certain class, I've always been surprised that there haven't been more books written about this transition from youth to a more routine maturity. A review of Little Children in the New York Times made this seem like a book that was finally exploring this territory.

After gobbling this book up in two days, I'm afraid it doesn't really explore that strange transition; it really doesn't explore anything at all. It skims over the surface of too many characters and too many events, and uses that oldest of devices - an extramarital affair - to sustain interest, without arousing interest in much else. When reading Perrotta's excellent description of a football game, I think I understood why: Perrotta writes like a movie. His smooth, readable prose translates easily into images, the plots dovetail in a contrived and predictable way, and the entire plot of the book is split up into short scenes just like film narratives. This book would be incredibly easy to convert into a screenplay, and I'm sure someone's doing just that.

Like many writers whose first exposure to storytelling was through television and the movies, Perrotta seems to write more for the screen than the page. The problem with this is that he doesn't use the resources of the page, the most important of which is giving the characters a real interior life. Everyone in Little Children, from the people having the affair, to the spouses, to the child molester and his mother, is given a thumbnail personality, and a sketch of their personal history, but no one feels particularly alive; I didn't feel like I knew a single one of them. Which meant I didn't much care what happened to them.

Good actors, and a sharp screenplay, could make this material feel more vibrant than it is. Election, already made from one of Perrotta's books, had incredible vitality, partially because it was more clearly satirical than Little Children, which walks the line between satire and realism, and ends up doing neither effectively. The little humorous touches are what work best: for example, the line about JFK Jr. being the patron saint of people who have failed the bar exam, since the fact that he failed twice is sympathetically mentioned to Todd every time his inability to pass is brought up.

Other than these funny bits, the writing is good without ever being great. The big problem, I think, is that none of the characters have the power to surprise us. Todd and Sarah's affair proceeds in quite an ordinary way, the characters think thoughts that are always commonplace, and Perrotta ends with Todd's decidedly unrevelatory realization that his affair is exciting only because he is married. The thrill comes from the break in routine, not from the relationship with Sarah; the second Sarah replaces his wife as his primary relationship, he'll feel restless again. Well, obviously.

If an author wants to startle us, he either has to force us to identify with his characters, or at least understand how they think (for example, with the child molester), or depict the social forces that create these dreary people. Or, finally, make the book so funny or entertaining that we don't care about how predictable the characters are. Perrotta throws in some outlandish plot developments, like Sarah's husband being obsessed with an Internet pornography site, and then going off to see the woman who runs it, but someone the husband still felt like the same boring old guy; I wouldn't have cared if he'd ended up being the porn queen's long lost brother. Now, if Perrotta's point is that these people just aren't that special, then I don't see why I should bother reading a book about them.

The most interesting part of the book probably illustrates this. It comes in the book club that Sarah joins that is discussing Madame Bovary, the umbrella from under which all this infidelity-as-response-to-boredom literature emerged. Sarah says that Madame Bovary's problem wasn't that she was unfaithful, or excessively romantic, but that she committed adultery with losers, and never found anyone worthy of her heroic passion. Now, it isn't fair to compare every novel with old masterpieces, but Perrotta might have considered his own character's statement, and thought about whether anyone in his book either had, or was worthy of, that sort of passion. And, if not, why write about them?