I’ve updated my Amazon Reading List for 2010.

I finished reading Tom Perrotta’s Little Children last night  and awoke today feeling no different.  I like to read a book that makes me want to be a better person, or makes me want to go out and change the world, or at least change my world and avoid the mistakes the characters in the book were destined to make.  In Little Children, everyone got what they ultimately wanted, just not when they wanted it, and their wants weren’t always what was really good for them or their spouses in the end (things could have worked out differently) but it was what they deserved.

The book mainly focuses around two couples.  There’s Todd and Kathy.  Todd is labeled “The Prom King” by moms at the playground.  He’s a stay at home dad for his young son, can’t pass the bar exam, and is pretty much feeling stagnant in his role.  His wife is a documentary film maker.  Then there’s Sarah and Richard.  Sarah is an aging feminist with a young daughter, and Richard is obsessed with internet porn.  The two couples’ stories converge on the playground where Todd and Sarah meet and begin an affair, that at first is based on the wonderful sex they have with each other and aren’t getting from their spouses.  It eventually turns into something much deeper for them.

I shouldn’t even waste time explaining the other characters in the story, because besides one, they are just pawns and the readers loses track of them quite easily while caught up in the affair happening between Todd and Kathy.  There’s Larry, an ex-cop who shot and killed a young kid in a mall who was carrying a toy gun.  He gets Todd to relive his glory days by making him join a community midnight football league. When they aren’t on the field, they are visiting the home of a child molester who’s just moved in to their community, where Larry thinks he is protecting his children by spray painting obscenities on their driveway or leaving flaming bags of poo on the doorstep.

Ronnie, the child molester, has just moved back in with his mom and wants to be left alone, but Larry won’t budge and continues to point him out and make things difficult.  Ronnie is also a wuss, although the reader is treated to a few frightening scenes where we almost lapse into Ronnie’s head and get to see that he truly is a monster.  The tensions between him and Larry rise to great consequences but fall short in the end.

Throw in a group of book clubbing, wine drinking, playground gossiping, yuppy moms who oogle over Sarah landing a kiss from Todd on the playground, and that’s pretty much it for this book in a nutshell. While the storyline of Todd and Sarah dominates most of the book, Perrotta tries to recover some of his other characters and their problems near the end, but it was almost too close to the end.  I’m still not even sure where Kathy is toward the climax of the book, even after going back and looking for her.

Perrotta also hands practically hands Ronnie the typewriter and lets him write some very haunting scenes that have the potential to totally change my opinion about this book as I finished the last page, but like I said, they fall short.  It’s like Perrotta wanted to go there, but decided against it because it’s not what he wanted for his book.  Sometimes we have to let the characters take over!  And in this case, I wish he had done just that.  If you read between the lines, you’ll know what I’m talking about and probably be just as disappointed that what you were thinking is not what ultimately happens.

Having dealt with infidelity in my own life, the reason for my parent’s divorce after 30 years of marriage, I think this book stands as a perfect example of how the spouses left at home in the dark are the ones you really feel sorry for.  In a sense, they are helpless little children who have been betrayed. But as a reader, I feel betrayed by Perrotta who led his readers, and his characters, to the end of a plot that could have been much better. I should have stepped out on this book and started an affair with another.