Perrotta’s latest novel is a smart and entertaining investigation of modern social issues: sexual harassment, hook up culture, sexually appropriate experimentation, masculinity, gender norms, transgender, middle aged woes, parenting autistic children, and of course family life and its dysfunctions. He does all this with a multi-character cast led by Eve Fletcher. Eve is a divorced suburban mother whose son is heading off to college. She has empty-nest syndrome at first, but then she gets used to her new life, taking a community college class on gender and society and meeting lots of new people. Perrotta is good at showing the distance between people’s beliefs and the way they experience the world – the prejudices they have about sexuality, gender, and family roles, and how they can be surprised by how life does not match their expectations.

In addition to Eve, we get chapters narrated by Eve’s son Brendan, her colleague Amanda, her community college professor, and a number of others. This rather familiar format has the benefit of balancing perspectives and showing how different people can misunderstand each other. It provides a multidimensional portrait of the characters as we get to know how they present themselves to others. And it helps avoid the monotony of a single narrator. We see Brendan struggle in his first semester in college as the limitations of the jock life he wants make themselves apparent. We see various members of Eve’s college class grapple with new ideas presented by their professor, a trans woman. And we see the professor outside of the comfort of the classroom, trying to negotiate her new life. Most of all, we see how Eve both relishes her new opportunities but also finds it difficult to follow through, and gets pulled back to conventionality by social pressures.

Perrotta is an acute observer of suburban American culture and he highlights its limitations in subtle ways – there’s nothing didactic in his work. The tone is often light and the book is easy to read. He is good in his capturing the complexity and tensions in our feelings about sexuality and gender, and his ability to do this in ways that do not sound professorial is impressive. On the downside, it sometimes feels as if he is filling his novel with a variety of social issues that have been hitting the headlines, and that his approach is rather broad. Still, he provides a distinctive perspective and this is a book that could work well to provoke readers to inspect their own prejudices.

© 2018 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.