mattpage

i love tom perrotta. i think he has a vile sense of humor (in a good way) and he gets that contemporary public education is an exercise in demonology,with its burnt out teachers, overpassionate teachers, clueless students, malicious students, inept administration...the list goes on. that is never my problem with this book. nor is his depiction of fucked-up suburbia. i've lived in the suburbs - they're fascinating microcosms. i also wasn't expecting another "little children" (a book i loved like five years ago). that novel was its own little slice of suburbanightmare. honestly, i picked up "the abstinence teacher" because the name sounded like something i'd read. and the premise itself isn't inherently flawed - sexual health teacher says, "some people enjoy [masturbation]" and brings down the wrath of khan. or jesus. or people who think they know exactly what frosts jesus's cookies. she is then forced to teach an "abstinence is best" version of the same class, with its inflated statistics and "scare 'em into keeping it in their pants" techniques, and she goes a little batshit crazy (culminating in the funniest scene i've read in a long time during which two 9th graders act out an exercise in just sayin' no during her class). all that was fine. and, point of fact, the character of tim also didn't upset me. i can deal with born-again, former-drugged out rockstar sex addicts. but what did upset me was all the christian rhetoric (not that i felt it was being pushed on me, because it clearly wasn't perrotta's agenda). it just tapped into a direction that part of this country seems fixated on heading toward and that scared the ever-livin' crap out of me. i am not a nutjob leftist (i prefer the term "moderate liberal")and i honestly believe everyone has a right to their own beliefs (provided they're not breaking any government-imposed laws), but so much of the book had to do with the inadvertant sharing of messages (and both tim and ruth are guilty of this in their own ways - tim with his prayer and ruth with her sex-ed crusade) and how those messages can impact those around us. negatively, positively, apathetically. for about 67% of the novel, i wanted to hit people. then, ruth hit a person, and i felt better. overall, though, I just didn't get it. sure, they were complicated, well-fleshed out character studies, but they went nowhere. fast. the end feels so anticlimactic that i found myself flipping through the novel looking for pages to a storyline i must have missed. i never found it.

2023-06-30 13:51