E-Mail This Article to a Friend Families, affairs Tom Perrotta’s ids with kids BY MIKE MILIARD
	Little Children By Tom Perrotta. St. Martin’s Press, 355 pages, $24.95.

The modern American suburb: a quietly thrumming hive of anomie and angst, where love and marriage seldom intersect and distress and dysfunction lurk behind smiling faces and clapboard façades. Belmont’s Tom Perrotta at once affirms and subverts that truism in his new novel, Little Children, bringing keen observation and mordant humor to the culs-de-sac of a fictional Boston ’burb where everyone is unhappy in his or her own way. His characters are so recognizable that despite their maddening selfishness and destructive stabs at happiness, one can’t help feeling for them.

In Election, Perrotta showed us high-school students whose venality would impress the most Machiavellian politician. In Joe College, he turned his sharp eye on the Ivy League. Now he’s all grown up — too bad his thirtysomething characters aren’t. There’s Todd, a chisel-chinned stay-at-home dad who’s failed the bar exam twice; when not trying halfheartedly for the hat trick, he’s with his son at the local playground, where a gaggle of mothers whisper excitedly about the "prom king" with the towheaded toddler. There’s Sarah, who’s still trying to figure out how she became one of those mothers; once a fiery feminist, she’s found herself quite by accident with a husband and a daughter and a stultifying suburban existence. "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."

Meanwhile, Sarah’s late-middle-aged husband, Richard, has closed himself off from her and their daughter as he descends into a world of Internet porn and soiled lingerie (purchased on-line at SluttyKay.com). And Todd’s gorgeous documentary-filmmaker wife, Kathy, hounds him to pass the bar and become the breadwinner she feels she and their son deserve. He’s happier to gaze at skateboarding teens at the local library or get pummeled in a midnight football league in a vain attempt to relive his college glory days.

So when Todd and Sarah kiss each other suddenly and passionately, in the glare of daylight, with their two children dangling on the swing set in front of them and the other mothers staring on in silent shock, the only surprise is that they seem to be so mismatched. It’s more of a shock that Perrotta can maintain your fondness for them, even as their acts of duplicity and self-centeredness mount.

Although the playground is one of the book’s focal points, the children in Little Children rarely figure. Who needs kids when you’ve got mature adults like Richard, upstairs at the computer with those panties pressed to his face, or Todd and Sarah, laying their respective kids down to nap in an upstairs bedroom so they can engage in feverish, furtive rutting on the living-room floor?

Perrotta’s writing style isn’t flashy. But his knack for capturing a variety of voices (from a four-year-old boy to an elderly woman) and the way he weaves in telling references to the minutiae of quotidian suburban existence (juice boxes and Blue’s Clues, book clubs and cybersmut) make for characters who are idiosyncratic but familiar, difficult to condemn, difficult not to empathize with. Even Ronnie, a slovenly paroled child molester whose arrival in the neighborhood sets the plot’s dynamics in motion, isn’t a caricature. Perrotta’s rendering of his infirm and aggrieved mother, who clings to the hope that a girlfriend might make him normal, encourages us to see him as a human being, however flawed. (Perrotta uses him not just as a catalyst but as a foil: his abhorrent urges make these parents, with their garden-variety failings, look saintly by comparison.)

As the pages turn, the characters do grow up . . . a little. Kathy comes to realize she’s been so hard on Todd because she is "a coward . . . a selfish person who wanted to have it both ways — wanted to live the interesting life of an artist without accepting the unpleasant financial sacrifices. . . . " But is it too late? As she ponders this, her husband is making love to another woman, congratulating himself for realizing, finally, that "beauty was only part of it, and not even the most important part. . . . He was proud of himself for wanting her so badly. It made him feel like he’d grown up a little . . . like he’d traveled to a faraway place and learned to appreciate an exotic food."

Is Todd finding fulfillment that will, in the long run, allow those around him to be happier? Or by neglecting his wife and career is he just being an egocentric prick? Perrotta leaves that up to us. What he suggests is that, one way or another, we’ve all got some growing up to do.

Tom Perrotta reads in the Newtonville Boooks series, with special musical guest Bill Janovitz, at the Attic, 107 R Union Street in Newton, this Tuesday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m.; call (617) 244-6619.