Tom Perrotta's Suburban Distopia

Short, with graying hair and an athletic build, Tom Perrotta enters a Starbucks in Belmont, the Boston suburb where he makes his home. He’s smiling amiably behind his glasses, the picture of contentment—and with good reason. His latest novel, Little Children (available in paperback this January), has been the most critically acclaimed of his career, grabbing the cover of the New York Times Book Review. The book will likely appear on many “year’s best” lists, and has landed him a job writing a screenplay version with Todd Field of In the Bedroom. At a recent reading, Perrotta was treated like a rock star, approaching the stage to a cheering club audience after a performance by Buffalo Tom’s Bill Janovitz.

“It was the kind of thing where one bad review could just have cooled [everything],” he says. “Instead everything was just one thing after another after another—one thing better than the next. It was just that experience of a book kind of breaking through to the right audience that I’d never had before.”

Perrotta is apparently living the suburban American dream with his wife and two children—happy, successful and content. In other words, everything the characters in his novels aren’t. He laughs as he considers this. “I think there are, of course, happy and satisfied people in the world,” he says. “It’s hard for a novelist to know what to do with them.”

Instead, he frequently writes about bored or restless suburbanites trying to break out of a rut, often through infidelity. Dave, a wedding musician in suburban New Jersey, proposes to his longtime girlfriend on a whim in The Wishbones. In Little Children, Todd and Sarah escape the drudgery of babysitting at the playground in Bellington, a Boston suburb. “I think a lot of my characters are people who feel like they drifted into their lives, and infidelity seems like a good vehicle, or [they] put themselves in a position where they can exercise a choice,” Perrotta says. “Especially if they’ve drifted into a marriage.”

More often than not, Perrotta’s characters can act in an obviously right or wrong way, and his audiences at readings tend to point that out to him. Recently, a woman saw fit to tell Perrotta how Todd from Little Children could have avoided his affair by explaining his feelings to his wife. “And I thought, that’s like the death of the novel—the self-aware character,” he says, laughing. “And I think even people who think of themselves as extremely self-aware, on some level have illusions about themselves. The novelist needs the character to have illusions in some sense.”

Perrotta does share one thing with his characters: a suburban address. And though you could drive 20 minutes in any direction from this Starbucks and recognize the area Perrotta describes in Children, only a few details are drawn from Belmont and a nearby neighborhood, Arlington. “I was surprised to the degree people would say, ‘Oh, that’s Belmont!’ or ‘That’s my town!’ because there’s not a whole lot of detail,” Perrotta says. “It struck me in a way that so much of suburbia is generic that it takes very little to kind of evoke it for people.”

This Anytown backdrop is practically a chief antagonist. Perrotta’s suburbs are both familiar and challenging, depressing and comforting. In the stifling suburbs, any forward momentum a character could muster stands out—and Perrotta enjoys playing with that friction. “In Little Children I thought, ‘there’s something so sexless and boring from an adult standpoint about the world of the playground, but if I can make that sexy, that would be an accomplishment,’” he says. “So I’m often drawn to the microcosm and drawn to the banal, trying to somehow charge that up.”

Children has been called satirical as a means of praising it, a characterization with which Perrotta disagrees. Satire was fine for the movie adaptation of his novel Election, in which the characters were exaggerated for effect. But in his books, Perrotta sees satire as an obstacle to a psychologically realistic narrative. “As a writer, I’m always trying to control and suppress it, make the characters real,” he says. “It’s like the satire’s pressing against the reality.”

As for the connection between the reality of his own life in the Boston suburbs and that of his characters’ lives, that’s mostly—though not entirely—coincidental. Finding Perrotta in his own work is not as simple as noting the similarities between Belmont and the fictional version of Bellington. His last novel, Joe College, was somewhat autobiographical. “I was writing very explicitly about something that happened to me, but I changed tons of stuff,” he says of College. “Whereas, in Election and Little Children, which I think of much more as kind of public novels and not autobiographical novels, I end up donating little bits of myself to this character and that character. I’m much more spread out through it.”