Little Children is a
pleasing novel of suburban marital discontent. It has moments of great humor,
and some serious themes, most notably the presence of a pedophile in the
community. Perrotta writes well, and reading the book should provoke intense
enjoyment in those who enjoy the genre — the first half of the novel is
especially strong in portraying the tensions between couples and the sense of
long-term bewilderment as people in their thirties who start to wonder what happened
to all their ambitions and whether they have taken the right path. Sarah is a
mother with a three-year-old daughter who had been a committed feminist in
college and who never envisaged herself becoming a housewife married to an
older man. Todd is a stay-at-home dad with a three-year-old son. His wife
Kathy, a documentary-maker, supports him while he is meant to be studying to
retake his bar exam, but he has no enthusiasm for law. Todd is attractive and
athletic — he used to be a football player — so many of the local mothers
fantasize about him as they watch him at the local playgrounds. But it is
Sarah who makes the move to start a conversation with him, and soon the sexual
tension between them is powerful. The novel centers on the development of
their affair.

Perrotta paints suburban life as
essentially alienating: mothers are bored with their children, fathers engage
in violent football games to relieve the tedium of their lives and prove their
masculinity, and couples can hardly bear to talk to each other. The retired
police officer Larry Moon presents the most extreme example of this: he is
getting divorced and he spends much of his time harassing Ronnie McGorvey, who
has recently been released from jail for exposing himself to a child. McGorvey
is a pathetic man who lives with his aged mother, unable to get a job and
uninterested in forming a relationship with a grown woman. His presence in the
novel adds drama to the story, and shows how the other adults group together to
protect their children from the threat McGorvey presents. Perrotta takes
trouble to show how Larry Moon makes trouble for McGorvey’s mother, who has
never harmed anyone, and Moon seems just as dangerous and disturbed as the man
he is persecuting, while never downplaying McGorvey’s crime.

Ultimately, the theme of the novel
is the immaturity of the adults and the few deep satisfactions available in
modern life. However, as a piece of cultural commentary, it is flimsy and
itself unsatisfying. Most of the characters are two-dimensional and
unsympathetic, and condemnation of modern life is hardly insightful. Little
Children works far better as a comic novel of modern neuroticism and
dysfunction.

© 2005 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved. 

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also
editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction