Little Children

by Tom Perrotta Narrated by George Wilson

Overview

This New York Times best-seller has earned universal acclaim, including starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Booklist . With hits like Election and Joe College to his credit, author Tom Perrotta has established himself as a master of satire. Unhappily married Sarah passes her days at the local playground with her three-year-old daughter. When happily unemployed Todd (also married) and Sarah meet, their attraction is immediate. They begin a passionate affair just as their suburban utopia is rattled by the arrival of registered sex offender Ronald James McGorvey. With McGorvey in town, disgusted parents wonder if any of their little children will be safe. Perrotta's wry observations of suburbia make for a tremendously insightful tale. By adding a layer of suspense to his uniquely dark humor, he shapes Little Children into his most compelling novel yet.

Editorial Reviews

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.

The New York Times

This soccer-mom Bovary, like the original, grasps the fundamental sadness of characters trapped in middle-class stability and yearning for adventures gone by. But Mr. Perrotta is too generous a writer to trivialize that. What distinguishes Little Children from run-of-the-mill suburban satire is its knowing blend of slyness and compassion. — Janet Maslin

The Washington Post

… Little Children, like all Perrotta's work, is a virtuoso set of overlapping character studies, the sort of book where both a remorseless Stepford mom and an accused child molester can inspire pity and show themselves more than capable of their own sorts of compassion … Tom Perrotta is, indeed, all grown up now, and Little Children, is a greatly auspicious and instructive encounter with the dread world of maturity. — Chris Lehmann

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. East Coast author tour. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Perrotta moves away from his lighthearted, humorous tales of New Jersey (Joe College; Election) with his latest novel, a penetrating and absorbing portrait of three suburban couples and their failed marriages. There's Sarah, who was a bisexual feminist in college but has now married Richard, 20 years her senior, to escape a dead-end job; Todd, a handsome, stay-at-home dad who can't bring himself to care about repeatedly failing the bar exam; and Larry, a former cop who retired at 33 after mistakenly killing a 13-year-old boy. All of their lives collide with unexpected consequences the summer a convicted child molester moves into the neighborhood. Sarah and Todd have an extended affair, and Larry becomes obsessed with harassing the sex offender, while Richard turns into a devoted member of the online "Slutty Kay" fan club. Perrotta's poignant and unflinching prose skillfully evokes both sympathy for his characters and disdain for the convenience they have chosen. Highly recommended.-Karen T. Bilton, Somerset Cty. Lib., Bridgewater, NJ Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Several unstable marriages and a convicted pedophile's presence in a quiet suburban community ignite a complex, fast-moving plot. Darker than such sprightly entertainments as Joe College (2000) and The Wishbones (1997), Perrotta's fourth is an anatomy of marital and familial discord focused on four variously conjoined and separated couples. Sarah Pierce instantly falls for handsome househusband Todd, dubbed "the Prom King" by her fellow moms, who furtively ogle him at the playground where they all bring their kids. Sarah soon wants freedom from her (much older) husband Richard, a product consultant helplessly fixated on an Internet porn queen. Tod's wife Kathy, a hardworking documentary filmmaker, gradually loses patience with his failures to pass his bar exam. As Sarah and Todd begin a heady affair, ex-con sexual predator Ronnie McGorvey comes to live among them all with his widowed mother (and only companion) May, provoking neighborhood protests and stoking the already smoldering rage of Todd's touch-football league teammate Larry Moon, separated from his family and "retired" from the police department after he shot to death a black teenager brandishing a toy pistol. All these lit fuses eventually spark the superb extended climax, capped by a touching and deeply ironic resolution scene, which occurs at the same playground where its actions began. Savvy dialogue and interior monologue, characters so real you know you have relatives and neighbors exactly like them, and Perrotta's unerring grasp of the cultures of marriage and young parenthood pull the reader smoothly through a flexible narrative filled with little shocks of surprise and stunning set pieces (Kathy's awkward dinner partyfor Todd's "friends" Sarah and Richard, and his team's epic slugfest vs. a superior opponent are particular standouts). And the juxtapositions whereby Perrotta charts his several characters' interconnected misadventures are handled with masterly authority. An accomplished comic novelist extends his range brilliantly. Perrotta's best. Agent: Maria Massie/Witherspoon Associates

From the Publisher

Little Children offers a generous serving of laugh-out-loud moments... Perrotta is an astute student of 21st-century suburban life. He skewers—with a light touch—everything from book clubs to personal ads to mothers worried about getting their 4-year-olds into Harvard. At the same time he locates the humanity in even the most repugnant characters. Perrotta knows the white-picket fence dream is just that. Life is disappointing, sure, but a little bit of breezily sardonic humor goes a long way to ease the pain.” —USA Today

“The voice is so key to what's so good about the book...Little Children is certainly Perrotta's most ambitious book...it marks a leap for Perrotta, a suggestion that there may be bigger books inside him. It is also that rarity, a book that understands the mature wisdom of compromise without denying any of the accompanying melancholy.” —Charlie Taylor, salon.com

“Perrotta isn't breaking new ground when he reveals that American suburbs are petri dishes of ennui and alienation. But the he shows admirable zeal in prosecuting the case, and he comes as close as anybody to answering a not unimportant question: If the suburbs are the perfect community, the incarnation in grass and sunlight of American affluence, then how come life there is such hell?” —Time Magazine

“In this satirical suburban novel...Perrotta's unsparing eye registers sullen teenage skateboarders, a vicious amateur football league and a women's book group discussing Madame Bovary over goat cheese and Chardonnay...readers will await the inevitable crash with horrified glee.” —Newsweek Magazine

“The eponymous children in this satirical novel are actually adults who, chafing at the burdens of parenthood, try to re-create their unencumbered youth...The humor is sometimes cruel, but Perrotta never betrays the complexity of his characters.” —The New Yorker

“Like the author's Election, this book tackles serious topics—like adultery and even pedophilia—with a surprisingly light tone.” —US Weekly Magazine

“Big Important Book of the Month...Perrotta wisely refuses to condescend to the world he satirizes, and his masterful perspective provides the reader with a breezy omniscience over the character's failures in life. The book is disarmingly funny but rueful...the book's screenplay speed makes it infinitely readable. Little Children is a brave novel...engrossing, compassionate.” —Esquire Magazine

“What a wicked joy it is to welcome Little Children, Tom Perrotta's extraordinary novel...a sterling comic contribution...raises the question of how a writer can be so entertainingly vicious and yet so full of fellow feeling. Bracingly tender moments stud Perrotta's satire...at once suspenseful, ruefully funny and ultimately generous...What is Tom Perrotta but an American Chekov whose characters even at their most ridiculous seem blessed and enobled by a luminous human aura?” —Will Blythe, New York Times Book Review

“Little Children will be Mr. Perrotta's breakthough popular hit...poignantly funny...What distinguishes it from run-of-the-mill suburban satire is its knowing blend of slyness and compassion.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times Review

“The cast is so real that book groups will have a blast comparing people they know to the ones in the book. Perrotta is that rare writer equally gifted at drawing people's emotional maps...and creating sidesplitting scenes. Suburban comedies don't come any sharper.” —People Magazine

“Tom Perrotta's Little Children made me laugh so hard I had to put it down...an effervescent new work...a gentle, sparkling satire.” —Entertainment Weekly

“With Little Children Perrotta has moved into the suburbs with a wrecking ball. He has cooked up recipes of depravity that would curl Betty Crocker's hair. If good satire can generate a corrective jolt, this may be a deadly shock.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Darkly comic, with a mischievous eye for absurd and intimate detail...a virtuoso set.” —Washington Post Review

“With this, his fifth book, Tom Perrotta has to be considered one of our true genius satirists. Little Children is a great book. Hilarious (I haven't laughed out loud so much over a book in years) but also deeply compassionate and, at times, terrifying. It's both an indictment of, and an elegy to, that odd sociological construct known as suburban America. I was enthralled by every page, and damn if I didn't find myself wishing I'd written it.” —Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River

Dennis Lehane

"With this, his fifth book, Tom Perrotta has to be considered one of our true genius satirists. Little Children is a great book. Hilarious (I haven't laughed out loud so much over a book in years) but also deeply compassionate and, at times, terrifying. It's both an indictment of, and an elegy to, that odd sociological construct known as suburban America. I was enthralled by every page, and damn if I didn't find myself wishing I'd written it."

APR/MAY 05 - AudioFile

The path of least resistance becomes just another excuse for characters in search of spiritual solace from the stifling boredom of suburban life. Bestselling satirist Tom Perrotta uses a darker palette than in previous works as he mixes several shaky marriages with stifling summer heat, the crushing routine of child care, and a child molester recently released from jail. The result is an exotic mélange of wry humor and heartbreaking pathos. Narrator George Wilson perfectly captures the tone of weary characters whose lives play out in pervert-stalked playgrounds and cookie-cutter houses behind white picket fences. R.O. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169389456
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	03/05/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

LITTLE CHILDREN

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By TOM PERROTTA

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Tom Perrotta
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-312-31571-6

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Chapter One

BAD MOMMY

THE YOUNG MOTHERS WERE TELLING EACH OTHER HOW TIRED they were. This was one of their favorite topics, along with the eating, sleeping, and defecating habits of their offspring, the merits of certain local nursery schools, and the difficulty of sticking to an exercise routine. Smiling politely to mask a familiar feeling of desperation, Sarah reminded herself to think like an anthropologist. I'm a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself.

"Jerry and I started watching that Jim Carrey movie the other night?"

This was Cheryl, mother of Christian, a husky three-and-a-half-year-old who swaggered around the playground like a Mafia chieftain, shooting the younger children with any object that could plausibly stand in as a gun-a straw, a half-eaten banana, even a Barbie doll that had been abandoned in the sandbox. Sarah despised the boy and found it hard to look his mother in the eye.

"The Pet Guy?" inquired Mary Ann, mother of Troy and Isabelle. "I don't get it. Since when did passing gas become so hilarious?"

Only since there was human life on earth, Sarah thought, wishing she had the guts to say it out loud. Mary Ann was one of those depressing supermoms, 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. No matter how many hints Sarah dropped to the contrary, Mary Ann refused to believe that any of the other mothers thought any less of Rush Limbaugh or any more of Hillary Clinton than she did. Every day Sarah came to the playground determined to set her straight, and every day she chickened out.

"Not the Pet Guy," Cheryl said. "The state trooper with the split personality."

Me, Myself, and Irene, Sarah thought impatiently. By the Farrelly Brothers. Why was it that the other mothers could never remember the titles of anything, not even movies they'd actually seen, while she herself retained lots of useless information about movies she wouldn't even dream of watching while imprisoned on an airplane, not that she ever got to fly anywhere?

"Oh, I saw that," said Theresa, mother of Courtney. A big, raspy-voiced woman who often alluded to having drunk too much wine the night before, Theresa was Sarah's favorite of the group. Sometimes, if no one else was around, the two of them would sneak a cigarette, trading puffs like teenagers and making subversive comments about their husbands and children. When the others arrived, though, Theresa immediately turned into one of them. "I thought it was cute."

Of course you did, Sarah thought. There was no higher praise at the playground than cute. It meant harmless. Easily absorbed. Posing no threat to smug suburbanites. At her old playground, someone had actually used the c-word to describe American Beauty (not that she'd actually named the film; it was that thing with Kevin what's-his-name, you know, with the rose petals). That had been the last straw for Sarah. After exploring her options for a few days, she had switched to the Rayburn School playground, only to find that it was the same wherever you went. All the young mothers were tired. They all watched cute movies whose titles they couldn't remember.

"I was enjoying it," Cheryl said. "But fifteen minutes later, Jimmy and I were both fast asleep."

"You think that's bad?" Theresa laughed. "Mike and I were having sex the other night, and I drifted off right in the middle of it."

"Oh, well." Cheryl chuckled sympathetically. "It happens." "I guess," said Theresa. "But when I woke up and apologized, Mike said he hadn't even noticed."

"You know what you should do?" Mary Ann suggested. "Set aside a specific block of time for making love. That's what Lewis and I do. Every Tuesday night at nine."

Whether you want to or not, Sarah thought, her eyes straying over to the play structure. Her daughter was standing near the top of the slide, sucking on the back of her hand as Christian pummeled Troy and Courtney showed Isabelle her Little Mermaid underpants. Even at the playground, Lucy didn't interact much with the other kids. She preferred to hang back, observing the action, as if trying to locate a seam that would permit her to enter the social world. A lot like her mother, Sarah thought, feeling both sorry for her daughter and perversely proud of their connection.

"What about you?" It took Sarah a moment to realize that Cheryl was talking to her.

"Me?" A surprisingly bitter laugh escaped from her mouth. "Richard and I haven't touched each other for months."

The other mothers traded uncomfortable looks, and Sarah realized that she must have misunderstood. Theresa reached across the picnic table and patted her hand.

"She didn't mean that, honey. She was just asking if you were as tired as the rest of us."

"Oh," said Sarah, wondering why she always had so much trouble following the thread of a conversation. "I doubt it. I've never needed very much sleep."

Morning snack time was ten-thirty on the dot, a regimen established and maintained by Mary Ann, who believed that rigid adherence to a timetable was the key to effective parenting. She had placed glow-in-the-dark digital clocks in her children's rooms, and had instructed them not to leave their beds in the morning until the first number had changed to seven. She also bragged of strictly enforcing a 7 P.M. bedtime with no resistance from the kids, a claim that filled Sarah with both envy and suspicion. She had never identified with authority figures, and couldn't help sensing a sort of whip-cracking fascist glee behind Mary Ann's ability to make the trains run on time.

Still, as skeptical as she was of fanatical punctuality in general, Sarah had to admit that the kids seemed to find it reassuring. None of them complained about waiting or being hungry, and they never asked what time it was. They just went about the business of their morning play, confident that they'd be notified when the proper moment arrived. Lucy seemed especially grateful for this small gift of predictability in her life. Sarah could see the pleasure in her eyes when she came running over to the picnic table with the others, part of the pack for the first time all day.

"Mommy, Mommy!" she cried. "Snack time!"

Of course, no system is foolproof, Sarah thought, rummaging through the diaper bag for the rice cakes she could have sworn she'd packed before they left the house. But maybe that was yesterday? It wasn't that easy to tell one weekday from the next anymore; they all just melted together like a bag of crayons left out in the sun.

"Mommy?" An anxious note seeped into Lucy's voice. All the other kids had opened Ziploc bags and single-serving Tupperware containers, and were busy shoveling handfuls of Cheerios and Goldfish crackers into their mouths. "Where my snack?"

"I'm sure it's in here somewhere," Sarah told her.

Long after she had come to the conclusion that the rice cakes weren't there, Sarah kept digging through the diaper bag, pretending to search for them. It was a lot easier to keep staring into that dark jumble of objects than to look up and tell Lucy the truth. In the background she heard someone slurping the dregs of a juice box.

"Where it went?" the hard little voice demanded. "Where my snack?"

It took an act of will for Sarah to look up and meet her daughter's eyes.

"I'm sorry, honey." She let out a long, defeated sigh. "Mommy can't find it."

Lucy didn't argue. She just scrunched up her pale face, clenched her fists, and began to hyperventilate, gathering strength for the next phase of the operation. Sarah turned apologetically to the other mothers, who were watching the proceedings with interest.

"I forgot the rice cakes," Sarah explained. "I must have left them on the counter."

"Poor thing," said Cheryl.

"That's the second time this week," Mary Ann pointed out.

You hateful bitch, Sarah thought.

"It's hard to keep track of everything," observed Theresa, who had supplied Courtney with a tube of Go-gurt and a box of raisins.

Sarah turned to Lucy, who was emitting a series of whimpers that were slowly increasing in volume.

"Just calm down," Sarah pleaded.

"No!" Lucy shouted. "No calm down!"

"That'll be enough of that, young lady."

"Bad mommy! I want snack!"

"It's not here," Sarah said, handing her daughter the diaper bag. "See for yourself."

Fixing her mother with an evil glare, Lucy promptly turned the bag upside down, releasing a cascade of Pampers, baby wipes, loose change, balled-up Kleenex, books, and toys onto the wood-chip-covered ground.

"Sweetie." Sarah spoke calmly, pointing at the mess. "Clean that up, please."

"I ... want ... my ... snack!" Lucy gasped.

With that, the dam broke, and she burst into piteous tears, a desolate animal wailing that even made the other kids turn and look, as if realizing they were in the presence of a virtuoso and might be able to pick up a few pointers.

"Poor thing," Cheryl said again.

Other mothers know what to do at moments like this, Sarah thought. They'd all read the same book or something. Were you supposed to ignore a tantrum and let the kid "cry herself out"? Or were you supposed to pick her up and remind her that she was safe and well loved? It seemed to Sarah that she'd heard both recommendations at one time or another. In any case, she knew that a good parent would take some sort of clearheaded action. A good parent wouldn't just stand there feeling clueless and guilty while her child howled at the sky.

"Wait." It was Mary Ann who spoke, her voice radiating such undeniable adult authority that Lucy immediately broke off crying, willing to hear her out. "Troy, honey? Give Lucy your Goldfish."

Troy was understandably offended by this suggestion. "No," he said, turning so that his body formed a barrier between Lucy and his snack.

"Troy Jonathan." Mary Ann held out her hand. "Give me those Goldfish."

"But Mama," he whimpered. "It's mine."

"No backtalk. You can share with your sister."

Reluctantly, but without another word of protest, Troy surrendered the bag. Mary Ann immediately bestowed it upon Lucy, whose face broke into a slightly hysterical smile.

"Thank you," Sarah told Mary Ann. "You're a lifesaver."

"It's nothing," Mary Ann replied. "I just hate to see her suffer like that."

Not that they would, but if any of the other mothers had asked how it was that Sarah, of all people, had ended up married, living in the suburbs, and caring full-time for a small child, she would have blamed it all on a moment of weakness. At least that was how she described it to herself, though the explanation always seemed a bit threadbare. After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they'd actually made some sort of choice.

But the thing was, Sarah considered herself an exception. She had discovered feminism her sophomore year in college-this was back in the early nineties, when a lot of undergraduate women were moving in the opposite direction-and the encounter had left her profoundly transformed. After just a few weeks of Intro to Women's Studies, Sarah felt like she'd been given the key to understanding so many things that were wrong with her life-her mother's persistent depression, her own difficulty making and keeping female friends, the alienation she sometimes felt from her own body. Sarah embraced Critical Gender Studies with the fervor of a convert, taking from it the kind of comfort other women in her dorm seemed to derive from shopping or step aerobics.

She enlisted at the Women's Center and spent the second half of her college career in the thick of a purposeful, socially aware, politically active community of women. She volunteered at the Rape Crisis Hotline, marched in Take Back the Night rallies, learned to distinguish between French and Anglo-American feminism(s). By senior year, she had cut her hair short, stopped shaving her legs, and begun attending Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual dances and social events. Two months before graduation, she dove headlong into a passionate affair with a Korean-American woman named Amelia, who was headed for med school in New York City in the fall. It was a thrilling time for Sarah, the perfect culmination to her undergraduate voyage of self-discovery.

And then-suddenly and with astonishing finality-college was over. Amelia moved back to Westchester to spend the summer with her family. Sarah stayed in Boston, taking a job at Starbucks to pay the rent while she figured out what to do next. They visited each other twice that summer, but for some reason couldn't recapture what had so recently been an effortless rhythm of togetherness. On the day before Sarah was supposed to visit her in her new dorm, Amelia called and said maybe it would be best if they didn't see each other anymore. Medical school was overwhelming; she didn't have the space in her life for a relationship.

Sarah had nothing in her life but space, but she didn't get involved with anyone else for almost a year, and when she did it was with a man, a charismatic barista who did stand-up comedy and said he liked everything about her but her hairy legs. So Sarah started shaving again, got fitted for a diaphragm, and spent a lot of time in comedy clubs, listening to tired jokes about the difference between men (they won't ask for directions!) and women (they want to talk after sex!). When she tried to explain her objections to humor based on sexist stereotypes, Ryan suggested that she extract the metal rod from her ass and lighten up a little.

Along with dumping Ryan, applying to graduate school seemed like the perfect solution for escaping the rut she was in-a way to recapture the excitement of college while also making a transition into a recognizable version of adulthood. She cultivated an image of herself as a young professor, a feminist film critic, perhaps. She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren't any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession's glutted with tenured old men who won't step aside for the next generation.

Continues...

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Excerpted from LITTLE CHILDREN by TOM PERROTTA Copyright © 2004 by Tom Perrotta. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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