The abstinence teacher

In a small US town, a liberal-minded female sex ed teacher comes under fire from the local evangelicals for daring to teach teenagers about contraception. Meanwhile, in the same town, a former drug addict turned evangelical Christian makes the "mistake" - having no will of his own, apparently - of leading the kiddie league football team he coaches in prayer. Tempers flare and everyone will have to look at their own actions and prejudices and... blah-de-blah-de-blah.

My first, and until I read this only, exposure to Perrotta was the movie adaptation of Little Children, which I really liked. Of course, it's possible that Little Children is a vastly superior book to The Abstinence Teacher, but I'm leaning more towards the idea that Todd Field and Kate Winslett can make anything look good. Because The Abstinence Teacher didn't agree with me at all. Which annoys me even more because it's such an interesting subject; the collision between fundamentalism and secular society, faith and doubt, freedom of religion and freedom from religion, etc... a great author could have made a great novel of this.

Unfortunately, Perrotta is competent at best. He writes like a journalist, padding his pedestrian prose with endless pointless asides as if he were paid by the word, and except for possibly the two protagonists, his characters are little more than clichéd parodies that we've seen hundreds of times before. There's a bit at the beginning, where our fearless (well, not really) sex ed teacher Ruth almost gets suckered in by the obviously exaggerated stories of an abstinence supporter (you know, the "My college roommate had sex and got AIDS and became pregnant and got raped ALL IN THE SAME WEEK" type.) Well, that's the kind of novel Perrotta has written; every single backstory is so generic, so simplified (apparently, every single Christian is either a former junkie or severely depressed) that it doesn't convince.

Even his two "heroes" are far too flat and unengaging to carry the novel; rather than shine a light on serious questions, they mostly just seem both single- and simple-minded. And while Perrotta occasionally uses them to ask an interesting question or two about the supposed subject, for the most part it's treated like a generic backdrop that serves no purpose but to advance the plot - which, granted, works pretty well, and it's certainly a quick, painless, harmless read. But for the most part, his own contribution to the debate seems to mainly be to line up the arguments from both sides, then he goes "people disagree, everybody makes mistakes, nobody can do much about it. Shrug."

According to wikipedia, Perrotta wrote the book because "I did feel somewhat inadequate as a novelist, just like I'd missed something huge happening in this country." He should have trusted that instinct and handed this plot idea to a more than just barely adequate novelist.