The Abstinence Teacher

I've never read Tom Perrotta's Little Children, which everyone raves about. I resisted it because it didn't seem it could have anything new to say about unhappy people with small children who are trapped in the suburbs. Fair or not, that's why I've never read it.

In The Abstinence Teacher, Perrotta takes on abstinence-only sex education AND evangelicals. Being something of a liberal-minded humanist, (and having seen the movie Election, based on another of his books), I expected complete and clever mockery of both of these issues. What I found instead, was that Tom P. does a pretty good job of showing the reasons people might believe in one or the other (or, more likely, both) of these lifestyles.

The sex-ed teacher is a forty-ish year old woman who's been forced into adopting the abstinence -only curriculum after she tells her high school students that "some people do enjoy oral sex." Ruth tries to subvert the program as much as she can, right down to wearing somewhat provocative clothing, but she's losing the battle, especially when the school's decision is supported by the new evangelical church in town.

Actually, the church doesn't have that much to do with the sex ed curriculum, but Ruth stirs up that hornet's nest when she screechingly protests the prayer her daughter's soccer coach 'forces" on the team.

The coach is a newish convert to the church and he is strangely likeable and vaguely troubled himself with the downsides to being an evangelical (He's not anti-gay, for instance, and he recognizes how lame it is to show up at a poker party with a six pack of...soda), but Tim is a solid believer and this is where Perrotta's success in story telling lies. He really made me believe that you could be a perfectly normal person and still an evangelical. (wow, admitting that I might have thought otherwise doesn't say much about me as a human being). He doesn't portray them as crazed or proselytizing (well, they do, a bit), or lacking in a sense of humor. They're even really into sex...as long as it's between husband and wife.

There's a great bit when Pastor Dennis gives Tim and his new Christian wife a book called Hot Christian Sex. The title isn't really treated as the joke it could be in another writer's hand. Instead, Perrotta lets Tim's own doubts point out some of the bizarre contradictions. Role playing was fine "just as long as the couple was married in the fantasy scenario, a requirement which struck Tim as a little unwieldy: Okay, you're the nurse and I'm the patient...and, uh, we got married just before my hernia operation."

Well, hot Christian sex with his wife not withstanding, we pretty much know that born-again Tim and reluctant abstinence teacher Ruth are bound to end up together, one way or another, by the end of the book. Perrotta is so even-handed in his portrayal of these two very different lifestyles, that I didn't want either character to change his life to "join" the other. When Ruth's friend asks if the soccer coach is cute, she answers: What difference does it make? He's a drunk married Christian." Randall pondered this for a moment. "Nobody's perfect," he told her.