Tom Perrotta's Culture Wars
Chris Bolton, Powells.com
Although it was his fifth book (and fourth novel), 2004's Little Children finally put Tom Perrotta on the map for many critics and readers. Two years later, the screenplay adaptation he co-wrote (with director Todd Field) earned him an Oscar nomination.
With his terrific new novel, The Abstinence Teacher, Perrotta proves his long-awaited success was no fluke. It's the story of a beleaguered sex ed instructor who comes into conflict with her daughter's soccer coach, an evangelical Christian who ignites a powder keg with a public prayer. The Abstinence Teacher manages to be both provocative and hilarious as it plunges fearlessly into the culture war being waged across our nation — and in our schools. As he did with Little Children, Perrotta combines dark material with a distinctive comic edge and vivid, unforgettable characters, resulting in a page-turning, thriller-like pace.
Perrotta made his publishing debut with his collection of semiautobiographical short stories, Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies. (Although, as recently revealed in Entertainment Weekly's "PopWatch" blog, his first publication was technically the R. L. Stine "Fear Street" novel The Thrill Club, which Perrotta ghost-wrote.)
Inspired by the 1992 presidential election with its memorable three-way race between Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ross Perot, Perrotta wrote the novel Election and spent years trying to sell it before the film rights were optioned by MTV Films, which prompted its sale to a publisher. The novel finally hit bookstores in 1999, mere months ahead of the acclaimed film version starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. In the interim, he published The Wishbones, about a New Jersey-based wedding band, and Joe College, based on his years at Yale in the early '80s.
In a starred review, Kirkus calls The Abstinence Teacher "shrewd yet compassionate" and proclaims: "Ruefully humorous and tenderly understanding of human folly: the most mature, accomplished work yet from this deservedly bestselling author."
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"[S]hrewd yet compassionate....Ruefully humorous and tenderly understanding of human folly: the most mature, accomplished work yet from this deservedly bestselling author." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
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"[An] intelligent, absorbing tale....Once again, [Perrotta] proves himself an expert at exploring the roiling psychological depths beneath the placid surface of suburbia." Publishers Weekly
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"Hilarious....Perrotta transforms '80s nostalgia into art." Entertainment Weekly
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"[O]ne of the funniest, most insightful, most surprisingly touching novels of recent times..." Time Out
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"Just like a good rock 'n' roll song, Perrotta's first novel...is straight-ahead, unpretentious entertainment" Booklist
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"Funny and ingenious....It's tempting to call Bad Haircut an 'auspicious' book, but that doesn't say enough; in fact Parrotta has already delivered the goods." Los Angeles Times
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Todd Field and Tom Perrotta
"Superb!...[A] movie that is challenging, accessible and hard to stop thinking about." A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Bolton: The Abstinence Teacher is coming out in three weeks. What is an author going through when his baby is just about to be born?
Perrotta: It's a weird time. I'm trying to be calm and Zen-like about it, but I notice I've been a little testy. [Laughter] It's a weird thing. I mean, this is the part you can't control. Everybody's got high hopes and done a lot of work and you're just waiting to see what happens when it hits the world.
Bolton: Have you read any advance reviews or do you stay away from those?
Perrotta: Well, I got the PW and the Kirkus and they've been very good. I haven't seen much beyond that. But there's a lot that's about to happen and that's part of it — there's this feeling of anticipation. You don't know exactly how it's going to work out.
Bolton: Are you anticipating it will be a grenade tossed into the culture wars?
Perrotta: That's the kind of thing I don't know. I mean, on the one hand you think, "Uh-oh, maybe this is going to cause a lot of trouble." That would be the better scenario. [Laughter] I don't expect any kind of "ho-hum" reaction, but you really want people to react and read it and be enthusiastic. That's the part where you just cross your fingers and hope it's gonna happen.
Bolton: Have you gotten any negative reactions yet?
Perrotta: No — but, of course, when you're the writer, people don't often come up to you... The people who have read it in advance and who want to talk to me seem very positive about it. I think the negative reactions are going to be down the road, if there are going to be any. I've spoken to some Christians who have read it and have been very reassuring, in terms of implying that I got it right and they felt like the character was familiar to them and that his spiritual troubles rang true. So that was heartening to me. I'm always extremely eager for people who know more about a subject than I do to approve of my work — that musicians like The Wishbones, or that people who went to Yale like Joe College, or whatever.
Bolton: Did the Christians you spoke to say anything about what happens to Tim at the end?
Perrotta: I don't like to talk too much about the end, but I think that will be an interesting point of contention. I think that Tim's faith is different at the end than it was in the beginning, but I wouldn't say that he's abandoned it.
Bolton: And have you heard from sex ed teachers?
Perrotta: No — that will be interesting, actually. [Laughter] Though I did a fair amount of research on that subject before I started writing the book, and I feel very confident on that front.
Bolton: What kind of research did you do?
Perrotta: I mostly read up on all sorts of controversial sex ed classes. I think the fault lines in that particular debate, once you do even a cursory amount of research, become clear very quickly. And I had a friend who works as a sex educator — not in public schools, but in the nonprofit world. I spoke to her about the subject matter and she said there were numerous cases where teachers had been persecuted for remarks that seemed innocuous to them but were inflammatory to a different audience. That's part of what's interesting in the book. Ruth doesn't see talking about oral sex as particularly controversial, just a fact of life, and Tim doesn't see praying as this incredibly awful thing. They both do what they do, I think, with a kind of innocence, and end up finding themselves in the center of a storm. Certainly the first time Tim prays, I think he does it innocently.
Bolton: In the very beginning of the novel, I was absolutely on Ruth's side. She was my favorite character, I instantly connected with her — whereas Tim, I was a little distant from and a little suspicious of. Somewhere around the midsection, my loyalties flipped. I wasn't suspicious of Ruth, but suddenly Tim's story started to really compel me. I wonder how much of that was because he was born again instead of being, say, a lifelong evangelical.
Perrotta: That may be part of it. For me, as a fiction writer, it was the realization that Tim was much more in process than Ruth. He was really dynamic and changing over the course of the book. Ruth is really likeable — I mean, I like her at the beginning. But I felt that, in a sense, the fight she's in doesn't shake her to her roots. She becomes wiser and takes some hits and thinks about her life and is tested, but I don't feel like she's a wildly different person at the end than she was in the beginning.
But I think that Tim is making life-and-death decisions, for him. He's a guy who's really trying to hang on and trying to make something of his life and is put to the test in a really serious way. I think, for the reader — and at least for me, writing it — watching somebody deal with those circumstances, and getting the sense that he's a decent person who's trying to do his best and is conscious of his failures in the past — all those things led me to really care about him, and at times I've gone as far as to say that he kind of hijacked the book. So I'm glad to hear you say that, in the sense that I feel part of my experience was successfully translated to you as the reader.
Bolton: How difficult was it for you to get into Tim's head?
Perrotta: That's where the real fiction writing comes in. The book is really a record of that process, because I didn't go back and change it much. I revised constantly as I wrote, and it took a couple of years to write the book. But in the very first section that I wrote from Tim's point of view — he's going back to his ex-wife's house to drop off his daughter — right in that scene, where he's looking at his ex-wife and feeling like he somehow got off the track of his real life and he's still deeply attracted to her and jealous of her new husband and torn about his own life...
The book has an odd structure. You're with Ruth for close to a hundred pages, you get a very clear sense of her struggle with these evangelical Christians, and I think you have a sense of the book. Suddenly it stops and there's a whole chunk with me trying to figure out for myself how this guy Tim got in this place where he's saying a prayer at a soccer game. It's a lot of history —and for me, anyway, an in-depth character study in the next hundred pages, that really tells you how Tim got to where he is. I think whatever else happens, you really get to know him in those hundred pages. And I had a sense of that just from the first scene, with all the submerged unhappiness and the sense that he's gonna soldier on through it, all the ways in which he's trying to constantly tell himself that it's all for the best, when his life is so full of sadness.
Bolton: It's an incredible change. The first time the prayer happens, I'm booing and hissing at the book, and then we get the introduction to Tim and see his process, and suddenly there's this relief when the prayer unfolds from his perspective. Did you feel like you wanted to go back and do the same for Ruth after that?
Perrotta: It's funny, I tried with Ruth and I think I did it much more quickly in the second chapter. There's a long chapter about the first time she had sex, which I think is important because one of the points of the book is that whatever it is that initiates your sexuality probably has very little to do with what's being taught to you in school. I wanted to get a ground-level view of what happened to Ruth, since you do get a chunk of her past that way and you sometimes get it through her interaction with her ex-husband or with her friends.
By the time I finished that hundred-page chunk of Tim, where the story starts and then it stops for a long time, and I was ready to pick up Ruth again, I really felt the need to kick-start the narrative. Really push forward at that point, because I felt it was risky to stop a story for that long. I generally try to write brisk narratives and keep pushing forward all the time, and stop at strategic moments to give a glimpse into a character's history and move around in time. But I felt like that chunk of Tim was crucial to the story because you had to have that sense of understanding his reality and possibly, as you did, really coming to care about him. But I did, after that, feel like it's time to move forward. Did you feel like you wanted that kind of detail about Ruth?
Bolton: I didn't feel it was missing. I was just curious if the pendulum would swing back the other way. It felt a little like you described: you set this up, announced the two opponents, and now the bell dings, and here they come into the ring.
Perrotta: Yeah, and I think for me, and it sounds like for you, and probably for most of the readers who are coming at it from a secular, liberal standpoint, Ruth is somewhat noble right away.
Tim is the more mysterious and troubling chaaracter. So I think that may explain why he needed to be treated with more of an in-depth examination.
Bolton: How hard was that for you? The more you wrote, did it seem easier to understand where he's coming from?
Perrotta: This has been the great lesson for me about fiction writing. It sort of happened in Little Children with the Ronnie McGorvey character. In every book there's an imaginative challenge, something that will force you to go beyond what you're pretty sure you can do. In this book, the whole time, it really was a question of, is it going to be possible for me to write a believable version of contemporary American evangelical Christianity? Because it really is a little bit outside of my daily life. I mean, [Ominous voice] they're all around us. [Laughter]
But honestly, I live in Massachusetts right outside of Cambridge, I move in a liberal enclave, and I grew up among working class Catholics who were religious but not in this totalistic way. They did their church and performed their rituals, but they had a kind of breezy attitude toward the whole thing, like you did your time and the rest of the week belonged to you. I didn't know many people who really were thinking 24 hours a day, Can I live up to my faith? Can I live up to the challenge of this commitment I've made to God? That just hasn't been a really familiar part of my life. So that was a challenge.
What was great, I think, was this sense I had of how accessible that culture is once you scratch the surface of contemporary America. I went to church, just to see what contemporary evangelical worship looked like, but I spent a lot of time on the Web. There's a whole world of Christians talking to one another on the Web. I would do that every day and I'd read the Bible. It seemed like at a certain point it was pretty easy to feel connected to that world. Almost submerged in it without physically spending a whole lot of time in it.
Bolton: What was your initial inspiration for the book?
Perrotta: It really was the election in 2004, and probably some of the time leading up to that, because it seemed so clear to me that Bush had been a disastrous president. I remember when it was becoming clear that he was probably going to win again, and that, in a kind of micro-way, it was these evangelical values voters in places like Ohio who were basically going to put him back in office because he was against gay marriage. It was one of those moments where I went, "Who are these people?" [Laughter] I would say it all the time, and then I'd hear other people saying, "Who are these people?" [Laughter] I felt as a novelist that I'd really dropped the ball on it. I didn't know who they were, and they were all around.
And I think as a writer you just feel a certain kind of personal electricity, like that stuff was burning, in the same way that in 1992 I got kind of obsessed with the election — and that thing called "the character issue," that ended up following Clinton for the rest of his presidency, first came up. I thought as a writer that was a really interesting phrase and that led me to write the book Election. I see this one as being very connected to Election in that they both really were inspired by presidential elections and the questions they raised about American culture.
Bolton: You've had excellent luck with presidential elections.
Perrotta: I'm not a political junkie, but right around presidential elections I become extremely interested. I think I take democracy seriously enough to think something really important is being revealed about who we are. It is interesting that I've done that twice. It's always weird as a writer because then you think, "Oh, maybe that's what I do." So the next time I'll be wondering if I have to write another novel.
Bolton: I can't wait to see what happens in 2008. [Laughter] Did you feel any pressure or intimidation following up Little Children — which was more or less widely seen as your breakout book?
Perrotta: That's an interesting question because I feel like I should have, and probably in theory I did. But I think the great thing about any novel, once you're into it, is that the problems it raises are so immediate that everything else falls away. You can think about pressure in the abstract — and I bet some people do, and I'll bet it can be a little bit paralyzing — but for me, if I can just get started, then I'm really just dealing with the nuts and bolts of writing a book. I think the other thing is — and I remember trying to explain this to someone — so I'm quoting myself, here: It's not like I had six ideas and had to pick one that I felt was going to be really popular. This was the idea I had, and I decided I was going to write it, and once I did that I think all that other stuff fell away.
I think I feel it now. Little Children was under the radar when it came out and it did better than people expected. It really did change my profile, I guess. Now my publisher has high hopes for The Abstinence Teacher. And so, whereas Little Children surprised everybody, this one has expectations on it. So I feel it now, but I didn't feel it in the writing, which I think is the important thing.
Bolton: Rereading some of the reviews for Little Children this week, this one theme kept popping up over and over, something to the effect of: "Wow, there's been some kind of seismic change between Joe College and Little Children." But I read Joe College recently, and I don't see it. The subject matter is more serious in Little Children, but all the storytelling strengths are still there in Joe College. It's a lighter story in some ways, but there were things in it that seemed absolutely life-or-death serious to me. I mean, they are things that feel "life or death" when you're young. Did you feel some sort of lightning bolt between the two books?
Perrotta: No, I didn't, and I'm glad you said that in a way. I almost felt like people just wanted to say, "This is an adult book and those other books were coming-of-age books." I almost feel like I'd gotten maybe pigeon-holed in a slightly erroneous way because I'd written about stories that could be put in a box called "Coming of Age." With Little Children, you see it all the time, "Oh, he's entered the adult world." Somehow the adult world is supposed to be more serious than that other world, and I'm not sure I buy that distinction. But I do think with Little Children, maybe people could see it more easily as a serious novel because of certain signals it gave off or certain territory that it ventured into.
Even then, with all that, I was often struck by how many people still wanted to put Little Children into that box of, you know, "This is funny, this is lighthearted." Because those phrases pop up a lot in those reviews, and I was startled because it felt to me like it had gone into fairly dark territory. But even Joe College had.
The distinction I would make is that Joe College, along with The Wishbones and Bad Haircut, was fairly autobiographical. And I see Election, Little Children, and The Abstinence Teacher as being not so much based on my own personal stuff, but on broader cultural issues. And I think it's easier to see it with Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher. I think Election was mistaken for a kind of high school romp at the time. But I do feel like there has been a kind of movement away from the autobiographical in my work and maybe that's helped people to see these other dimensions.
Bolton: The label I kept finding in the late '90s reviews was "Nick Hornby-esque." And it was all because you'd written The Wishbones —
Perrotta: Right around the time High Fidelity came out.
Bolton: So if it's a funny novel and it had music, you're Nick Hornby.
Perrotta: That's been a funny thing for me. In fact, I had a sticker in my office, because the Italian translation of Little Children had a sticker placed on the book that said "Il Nick Hornby Americano." [Laughter] I love that.
I think Hornby's terrific, but I have felt for a long time like that was misplaced. I don't blame people; I think you want to have a sense of a writer. You want to place him in a familiar context. So yeah, Bad Haircut came out and there were inevitably mentions of Salinger. If you write a story about a teenager, they'll mention Salinger. Even though I think it had absolutely nothing to do with him; my character was such a regular guy and not a sensitive outcast — just the complete opposite. But again, people would use it because it helps. And if you write a book and it's set in a suburban community, somebody's going to mention Updike. It's a territory that's been colonized before. But yeah, because of the music, I got the Hornby thing.
Bolton: Was Little Children in any way a conscious move away from autobiography?
Perrotta: I wish I could say that this stuff is planned. It's really a matter of you get some idea and it's the idea that you have and it's sort of alive and you do it. I think what happened was, my wife and I had kids, and I spent a lot of time on playgrounds. I'm always looking for something that feels counterintuitive or somehow alive to me. I remember being on the playground and feeling bored and depressed, thinking "This place is so un-sexy." It seemed like such a funny thing: sex had brought all these people to this place and there was absolutely nothing sexy at all here. I thought, Wouldn't it be funny and surprising to write a really sexy story set on a playground? That was just the original impulse, and then it turned into something bigger and darker than that.
But it wasn't a conscious thing at all. It could have been, I guess. It was based in my own experience, but it ended up not having a character who wasn't standing in for me. I guess that made it feel less autobiographical.
Bolton: When I was reading Little Children back in 2004, a writer friend was reading it at the same time, and we were constantly emailing excerpts and updates to each other, and we kept asking, "How the hell did he do that?" It was as though you'd taken the suburban drama and juxtaposed a thriller template onto it. It was impossible to stop reading. With a well-written novel, you're always turning pages, but this felt different — the smallest gesture had these incredible, suspenseful ripples. And the same thing happens with The Abstinence Teacher. I guess I'm asking: What is this magic formula you're drinking in the morning?
Perrotta: [Laughter] That's very sweet of you. I wrote a novel years ago that didn't get published. It was about a family that won the lottery and they sort of fell apart. It was a big novel and I had a lot of hopes for it. I had an agent who sent it out and it got rejected everywhere for years and years. A lot of people said the same thing: "Oh, the set-up was so good, and then it just kind of fell apart."
Then, when I wrote Election, I wanted something that had a built-in structure, and the election seemed like a really good idea for that. And it had a time-frame that was limited. When I wrote it I remember telling myself, "Okay, I'm gonna write about an election in Election, but I'm not going to know as I write about it who wins. I'm going to keep the outcome as unknown to me as I possibly can." That's become a kind of method for me. I'll write a book and I'll kind of know what the question is, but for as long as I possibly can, I'll try to keep myself from knowing the answer. And if I push in one direction, I'll try to push back in another direction.
Bolton: So while you're writing, you're as much in suspense as we are reading it.
Perrotta: Yeah, although maybe I know a little bit before you do. But, like with Little Children I went: Okay, this woman's going to be waiting on the playground for her lover, and the question's going to be, does he show up? I honestly tried for as long as possible to not know in my own mind if he was going to do that. Then it just came right down to the wire, and I did feel like that somehow created this real sense of suspense. I wrote the last hundred pages of that book at a breakneck pace — I think I felt sort of the way you did reading it, and I did think it had been a thriller. And that's something I've been interested in for a long time. I read hardboiled writers in college and really loved that stuff and took it in in a kind of deep way. I don't write anything that, to me, is genre, but the energy in genre fiction is something I've been trying to figure out a way to keep in what seems to me like more conventional literary fiction.
Bolton: I was just reading the book Telling Lies for Fun and Profit by Lawrence Block. And at one point he talks about how much he loved science fiction, but he just couldn't write it. He tried and tried but it didn't work — the genre just didn't want him. Have you ever taken a crack at crime writing or detective fiction?
Perrotta: No, but it's something that I have pondered. I just read John Banville's book Christine Falls that he wrote as Benjamin Black. It was very interesting to see somebody who's a very literary writer... it actually wasn't as trashy as I'd hoped. [Laughter] It was pretty literary for a genre novel. But you still felt like there was a certain crackling narrative energy that you don't always find in books with Banville's name on them.
Every now and then literary writers try that. I think I'd do it if I felt like it wasn't slumming and a matter of playing around.
Bolton: Since you mentioned the writing style, how much do you agonize over your prose?
Perrotta: Some people think maybe I should agonize a little more. [Laughter]
I go back and forth. I feel like I have a style but I'm not a stylist. I want it to be transparent, I want it to move, I want sentences to have some energy in them, and that doesn't come easy to me. Dialogue comes easy to me, but writing descriptive prose is just hard. A lot of the agonizing in the writing is over that, just getting the sentences to work.
I think structure and dialogue are things that come fairly naturally to me, but descriptive prose is tough. In fact, I think it's one of the reasons I was drawn to a kind of minimalistic prose early on in my career. I feel like I'm getting fuller now, but there are people who just write and write, like Thomas Wolfe, people who write a thousand pages and have to boil it down to four hundred. Whereas I'm constantly trying to bulk up the description because my natural mode, I think, is to be very sparing.
Bolton: Do your first drafts come out a little thin?
Perrotta: It's hard to ever call anything a first draft. I won't write chapter two until I feel like I have chapter one exactly as it should be. So it could take months to write chapter one, but it is really a matter of layering on top of what's already there. So that's my revision process. It's much more adding than cutting.
Bolton: So, for instance, the first paragraph of The Abstinence Teacher — I actually stopped after I read that and stared at the wall for a while, thinking about how I knew this character. I'm sitting here thinking this is incredible, this is one paragraph, and some writers will give you chapter upon chapter about the backstory, and luminous prose and what-not, and you nail it in one paragraph.
Perrotta: That is definitely the first paragraph that I wrote. And that's the case for Little Children and Joe College. I kind of know when it's there and then I can go on. I don't know if you're a football fan, but they always say if you complete that first pass the rest is easy. And I would never tell a student to do it that way. Very often you'd write a draft to get to know your characters, and then you'd be able to start in the right place. But for some reason by the time I start I feel like somehow I can know that character enough to get started.
Bolton: Do you do any outlining beforehand?
Perrotta: No. I try to define the question I'm going to illuminate. In this case I don't think I understood Tim's role when I started with Ruth. I was really interested in evoking this clash between this woman and the church. I think I imagined that a lot of the tension was going to be with Ruth and her kids, that they were going to be drawn to the church. Tim at first seemed more like an instrumental figure, and that the prayer was somehow going to lead to Ruth feeling like her family's under siege. Maybe because it helps to have a kind of sexual energy within a novel, he sort of took on that role — but I don't think I started with that role in mind.
[SPOILER ALERT! The next question has mild spoilers. If you want to keep the ending of The Abstinence Teacher a complete mystery, skip down to the following question.]
Bolton: I've reread the last chapter five or six times because it was such a left turn for me. I felt that I could see where the plot was headed, building to a huge climactic showdown... but it ends on this quiet, ambiguous note that swept my legs right out from under me. Were you as surprised as I was?
Perrotta: I think I must have known a little ways before that, that I wasn't going to get to the big game. Sometimes these things are more like a gut feeling, and I think for me it was that I described two soccer games during the course of the novel, and it was actually very hard writing those games. Also I described two scenes where Tim prayed — once when he prayed voluntarily, in the throes of this real religious feeling, and once where I think he was pressured into praying and did it reluctantly. I think the third version of that was he's not going to pray. I felt like I didn't know how to make that dramatic.
It was interesting to step away from that and figure out a way not to go there. Every time I contemplated the big game, I couldn't work up any enthusiasm for describing it. [Laughter] Which made me realize, I think, that that wasn't where the story was. Because if it was, I think I would have had a very clear sense of how to go about it.
Those aren't things that I'm examining in a critical way as I write, but I'm feeling it, that I just can't see the game. In the same way, I couldn't imagine in Little Children, if Todd and Sarah ran off, what they'd say to each other in the car. It's just a dead spot. And that's how I realized that they're not going to go. I felt like I couldn't imagine the game and I thought: Okay, that's not where the story is.
When I first submitted this to my agent and editor, there was definitely this sense of, "I thought it was going to be a much longer book, because it seemed to be moving toward something and then sort of stops before that." My hope is that it's satisfying in terms of the arc of the characters and you don't miss the game. That's the hope, anyway.
[SPOILER OVER. Okay, now you're safe. Read on with no fear.]
Bolton: You mentioned the difficulty in writing the soccer games, which I thought were excellent. They were as exciting as watching a really good match happening in front of you. Which got me thinking about your short story "The Smile On Happy Chang's Face," from Best American Short Stories 2005, another story that I just loved. And I loved the stories in Bad Haircut, but it definitely felt like this was written ten years later, this was a writer who had changed in significant ways and was more assured in his voice and style. Do you have plans for another short story collection of more recent works?
Perrotta: I'd like to do that, and I definitely have enough. The problem is they were written over the course of... it's almost embarrassing, it's probably getting close to between fifteen and twenty years. Some of them probably go back to around 1990. I feel like they vary widely, it's almost like they'd be The Collected Stories rather than a really tight collection. I feel like I need to write maybe half a dozen new ones and really cull through the old ones. Somewhere down the road I'd like to do that.
"Happy Chang" and another one that I published recently called "Kiddie Pool" that was in Best Life — you can get it on my website in PDF format — are the newest ones, and those are the ones I really like. I'd rather start with them than have them tucked in among other work. Maybe the other work is better than I think and I just need to go back and reconnect with it, but I write so few stories. I'll write a book and then a story, then write another book, so that, over the course of those eighteen years, I probably have eight or nine stories.
Bolton: I know that you sold an original screenplay recently [Barry and Stan Gone Wild, co-written with Frasier producer Rob Greenberg]. Do you also mix screenwriting in there?
Perrotta: Yeah, and that's been part of it, too. Usually I would write a novel and not start another one for about a year, and in the course of that year I would write a couple of short stories or do some journalism, and earlier in my career I was teaching. Lately a lot of that time has been taken up with screenwriting. Right now I'm working on the Abstinence Teacher script with Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who were the directors of Little Miss Sunshine, so that's been fun. But that's taken up the spring and the summer this year.
Bolton: Do you have any inclination to work with [Little Children director] Todd Field again?
Perrotta: Down the road, I'd like to work with Todd. There's something about the movie business where you come together and then you move apart, people have other obligations — he had some other projects he was working on. I loved the movie Todd made of Little Children, because I felt it was darker and heavier than the book, and I was interested in that — especially with this one, where the subject matter was somewhat heavy to begin with, then given kind of a comic treatment.
Bolton: Did it surprise you how much darker the movie was than your book?
Perrotta: It didn't surprise me. Part of it is, if you see In the Bedroom you'll know that Todd is a really brilliant dramatic filmmaker. I think ultimately the subject matter of Little Children is fairly dark but there's a comic tone in the novel that disguised it a little bit. And I think always, when you take the language out... Not to compare myself to Nabokov, but when you take the language out of Lolita and turn it into a movie, it's a very different experience. There's just this layer of language that is your primary experience with a novel. Take that away and you're left with these naked events, and it's always going to be very different.
I thought about that very much with the movie of This Boy's Life. My experience of reading that book was one of great pleasure, even though there are times it was a painful book. But the language was so wonderful, and the narrator's voice was just so full of pleasure — and I think when that layer is taken away, you're left with a nightmare childhood.
Bolton: Are you already working on your next novel?
Perrotta: I'm not. I'm still doing the last revisions on the script, and then I'm going to do this tour — which, it's too bad I'm not coming to Powell's. I would have loved to. I'm going to San Francisco and Seattle, but somehow I'm flying straight over you. [Laughter] But once that's done and things quiet down, probably around the new year, I'm going to sit down and see what I've got.
I spoke to Tom Perrotta by phone on September 21, 2007, as the publication date for The Abstinence Teacher loomed large.
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