Oh, grow up!(Little Children)(Book Review)

Little Children, by Tom Perrotta (St. Martin's, 368 pp., $24.95)

THERE are certain kinds of stories, told in novels or movies, that for all their apparent ordinariness still yield fascination, even profundity, not to mention first-class entertainment. One might, for example, though this is not the place for it, delve into what makes the high-school movie a genre beloved not only by teenagers but by adults decades removed from their own high-school days. Why is it that, by comparison, movies about college rarely compel our attention?

So it is with the suburbs: with the suburban film and the suburban novel, of which Tom Perrotta has written an outstanding example. What could be more mundane than a grid of streets dotted with similar-looking trees and similar-looking houses with similar-looking residents driving around in positively identical Volvos?

Although nothing much happens in Perrotta's Little Children, which unfolds in a fictional Boston-area suburb called Bellington, this is a novel whose last page I was sad to reach. A brilliant comic, a deeply sympathetic and dead-on-accurate observer of human vulnerabilities, Perrotta is also the author of a novel that was turned into a 1999 high-school movie, one of the best in that lofty genre, Election.

The concluding paragraph of Little Children explains what the whole rest of the book is about. The story follows the arc of an adulterous relationship between a couple of suburban parents of small children who meet on the playing fields of eatin': a Bellington playground where Sarah, our female protagonist, is trying to pacify her bratty three-year-old daughter Lucy with those staples of suburban-at-home-mom-on-the-run nutrition, Ziploc bags full of Cheerios and Goldfish crackers. (Two Goldfish crackers are portrayed, as if about to kiss, on the book's front cover.) Todd, a house-husband whose wife is a documentary filmmaker, is spied by Sarah at the playground with his boy Aaron, and Sarah's girlfriends dare her to get his phone number. She does this, and ends up in a passionate kiss as well right there in front of the other moms. This leads to a summer affair.

In the book's final paragraph, Sarah looks back, having returned to the scene of her and Todd's first meeting, the playground: "She was here because she'd kissed a man on this very spot, and tasted happiness for the first time in her adult life. She was here because he said he'd run away with her, and she believed him--believed ... that she was something special, one of the lucky ones, a character in a love story with a happy ending."

Whether the ending really is happy you'll have find out for yourself. But the point here is compressed into that last phrase. Sarah gets involved with Todd--a good-looking dummy who's been trying unsuccessfully for years to pass the Massachusetts bar and become a lawyer--precisely because through their affair she enters into, in her own mind, a story. For Perrotta, suburban life is premised on a certain kind of story you tell yourself. In a big city, you are confronted with undisguised reality--the aerosolized particulate haze of car exhaust, the pummeling delivered upon your body in a crowded bus or subway, the vaguely ridiculous menace of urban youths, the misshapen desperation of street people. In the suburbs, even though you're only minutes from the city, it's like you live in the woods, a ...