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 | | The Abstinence Teacher (Readers Circle (Center Point)) by Tom Perrotta ISBN-10: 9781602850750 ISBN-10: 1-60285-075-5 ISBN-13: 9781602850750 ISBN-13: 978-1-60285-075-0 Hardcover 2007-11 Center Point Large Print Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description “Some people enjoy it.” That was all Ruth had said. Even now, when she’d had months to come to terms with the fallout from this remark, she still marveled at the power of those four words, which she’d uttered without premeditation and without any sense of treading on forbidden ground. (p. 11) Thanks to an off-hand remark made during a class discussion of oral sex, sex-ed teacher Ruth Ramsey finds herself a target of the Christian evangelicals who are increasingly influencing the schoolboard of suburban Stonewood Heights. Forced to attend remedial sessions with a smug “Virginity Consultant,” Ruth is isolated and alone, caught in the polarized red-versus-blue landscape of present-day American suburbia. It’s like “living in a horror movie,” she thinks, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or something. You never knew who they were going to get to next.” Divorced and sharing custody of her daughters with her ex, and sometimes attempting a futile date, Ruth spends many a lonely weekend wondering how her bleak existence came to be. Then one morning at her daughter’s soccer game, Ruth meets Tim Mason, a cute forty-something volunteer coach. Ruth feels an instant attraction to Tim, but when he draws the girls together for a spontaneous prayer circle after the game, she angrily yanks her daughter away from the proceedings, placing herself once again in the sights of the evangelicals. But Ruth has another unexpected problem: she can’t seem to get a handle on Tim, her supposed adversary, who keeps appearing at her front door. A recovering addict whose bottoming-out cost him his home and his marriage, Tim found his way to the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth through the intervention of Pastor Dennis, the charismatic preacher who put Tim’s shattered life back together in an approximation of happiness. Thanks to Pastor Dennis, Tim is now married to Carrie, a fellow Tabernacler who is attractive and attentive, if robotic. He plays guitar at the weekly prayer sessions in a sanitized reenactment of his days in a Grateful Dead cover band. He holds a respectable if unfulfilling job as a loan officer, well aware of the irony of the post for a man with his history. He is grateful for the help he has received from his church community and Pastor Dennis. But he can’t shake the yearning for something more, and a nagging attraction to that troublesome sex-ed teacher.... With The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta wades into the murky waters of contemporary American suburbia, fully deploying his proven gift for describing the panic lurking beneath its seemingly placid surface. Already widely known to book and movie audiences for his scathing satire mixed with remarkable compassion in works including Election and Little Children (both adapted for film, Little Children garnering Perrotta an Oscar nomination), this novel once again proves, as declared by the Los Angeles Times, “Perrotta’s balance of humor and pathos has no equal.” | ||
Reviews | ||
BLAH! Great premise, and I was into the book in the beginning. It started to just lose the plot and the characters were so poorly developed. The ending...I was like "are you serious? this is it??". Waste of my time. Too bad. | ||
Forgetttable Poorly developed characters - I can honestly say that I have no idea whatsoever WHY Ruth was so "attracted" to Tim. None. Zippo. Well, except maybe because he has "big hands"??? Predictable - so predictable Ends very abruptly So forgettable, I had to re-read a few pages each time I picked up the book, so I could remember what had transpired. As reviewed in the description, "...He's the Steinbeck of suburbia."--Time ??? Hating to sound so brusque; I don't think so. The author doesn't even come close to the prose and depth of Steinbeck. Apples and oranges. I usually share books with friends, but this one will just be donated to a library. | ||
Quite a boring read The book is ok..but just ok. It is quite a slow and boring read. It is, however a good basis of a book group conversation! | ||
From the frontlines of the culture wars Tom Perotta does have a knack of getting in front of the latest political wave with his novels. This one takes an entertaining look at the cultural wars. Ruth Ramsey, the health teacher in a suburban school, suddenly finds herself accosted by the religious right and their insistence on teaching education based on sexual abstinence. As luck would have it, I read this book just after reading a fascinating article in the New Yorker on this very subject. When it comes to the actual figures, it turns out that evangelical Christian teens who believe in sexual abstinence before marriage actually tend to have sex earlier than other groups and have far higher rates of pregnancy and STDs. In other words, abstinence doesn't work. Back to the novel. Perotta has a fine eye for the lives and fears of middle-class, middle-aged suburbanites with their divorces, difficult teens and professional frustrations. He also creates a counterpoint to Ruth in former rock musician and druggee Tim Mason, now reborn as a youth soccer coach who found Jesus and joined an evangelical church with a truly scary preacher. Poor Tim even gets himself maneuvered into a "Christian" marriage with a younger woman he doesn't love. When Tim leads his girls soccer team which includes Ruth's daughter in an impromptu prayer after a game, the central conflict of the novel is set. Perotta tries to be sympathetic to all his characters -- but to me this was a flaw rather than a strength of this book. To my mind, the conflict he describes is not between two equally admirable but conflicting points of view. No, we're talking here about a battle between tolerance and intolerance and between fact-based education versus superstition mixed with ignorance. Still, I found this novel absorbing and entertaining. Few of our novelists are as much in touch with the pulse of the nation as Perotta. My biggest quibble concerns the end of the book which was frankly disappointing. The book ends not with a bang but a whimper. Why did he whiff the climax? Having set up all the conflicts and tensions, he leaves us hanging without bringing everything to the big explosion that he'd been building for the past 300 pages. What happened? Was it a loss of nerve or an artistic miscalculation? It's a great pity. This is a very good book -- it could have been great. | ||
Rather a disappointment In my readings of Tom Perrotta's previous novels Election and Little Children: A Novel, I was particularly struck by his gift for sparsity of language. In just a few short sentences about a character, he can make you feel as if you instantly have known the person intimately for years. He burrows directly into the center of their hearts and minds almost effortlessly, and the construction of these characters seems like the primary objective of the book, superseding any predispositions to be topical or satirical. These characters could be plucked out and successfully inserted into any story, and that makes them powerful enough to leap up off of the page and become more real than paper and ink can render them. No wonder both the film adaptations of "Election" and "Little Children" were so beautifully, brilliantly and successfully done. Little needed to be altered to make those characters come to life. That is not the case in his latest book, "The Abstinence Teacher." From the first page to the last, I still did not have a complete grasp of his characters. I didn't understand their motivations or their choices. I don't feel that Perrotta succeeded in conveying them to the reader, and instead of the fully living breathing manifestations I'm accustomed to with his work, I instead got the kind of pale sketches I would normally attribute to lesser writers. Because of these omissions, Perrotta does not earn the open ending this book contains, in which nothing is resolved or completed. He always leaves several major plot threads dangling, but in previous books he earned this right because he was so thorough in setting up the ending that your imagination could easily finish the story without further help from him. The worst thing about the open ending here combined with lack of character development is that I didn't CARE about the fact that nothing was resolved. I never got close enough to any of the characters to go beyond rudimentary involvement, such as rooting for the drug addict to stay clean or for the sex ed teacher to stay true to her principals. Unfortunately, I think Perrotta was too eager to make a statement about the vocal minority that comprises the religious right and their ability to swiftly, perniciously take control of the majority to really put much effort into constructing his characters. As others have noted, some of his characters are downright stereotypical, as if he was too lazy to even depart from the normal conventions of gay men, self-righteously puritanical women, and evangelical preachers. Sadly, what little depth of character he has managed to achieve makes the people pictured here weak and vacillating -- people it's hard to really empathize with since they show no strength of character. How can they? Perrotta hasn't given them any. Overall I wouldn't recommend skipping this book for fans of Perrotta, but I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read his books start with one of the others, and save this one for later on so that they don't get a skewed view of his writing, since this is clearly not his best effort to date. Maybe next time he'll prioritize basic character development over being topical or current and making "statements." | ||