Tom Perrotta’s 2004 novel, Little Children, has one of my favorite first lines: “The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were.” Immediately, Perrotta, a Jersey-born, Massachusetts-based writer, establishes his book’s world and its townspeople, their low-shouldered lameness. The banality of the sentence’s content, and the flatness of its form, prepares the reader for a story about exhaustion and hunger. The sentence also announces Perrotta’s deep and abiding interest in ordinariness. The minimalistic writing style that marked his early work, and the plain-speak dialogue and descriptions that he’s developed throughout his career are reflective of Perrotta’s peculiarly specific writerly ambitions.

Little Children’s opening line is an effective introduction to Perrotta’s novel, but not because of its syntactical daring or high-brow cross-referencing. Its meaning isn’t radically altered by what follows. It doesn’t surprise the reader; it grounds him. Perrotta specializes in threading his stories with the kind of writing reading heads nod to, jolted page-by-page from the shock of recognition. It doesn’t condescend to the reader, but nor does it demand from him an extraordinary amount of work. For the most part, Perrotta earns his head-nodding reader’s trust with his storytelling abilities. Little Children, for example, is a highly-readable tragi-comic exposé of “normal” human behavior and the darkly funny ways in which people endure humdrum American existence.

Speaking with the Guardian in 2009, Perrotta made a remark that suggested a close relationship between who he writes about and who he writes for:

“I like to write simply and clearly. I never wanted to write for the guys I met in college; I wanted to write for the guys I grew up with who weren’t literary sophisticates.”

While this might reflect well on Perrotta-the-person, generous in his consideration of his audience, it seems like a compromise on the part of Perrotta-the-writer, a graduate of Yale who has often enjoyed commercial success that, in turn, has called his literariness into question. The worlds of High and Low don’t trust one another. When an artist combines elements from both spheres, or traditions, the result can be schizophrenically exciting, immediately gratifying in the way of Low Art, with the long-lasting impact, and complexity of High Art. Perrotta’s most recent work, however, suffers from his self-conscious restraint and cautiousness.

The prose on display in his new novel, The Leftovers, seems ill equipped to interestingly handle the lofty and uninspired themes that his book tackles: grief, hope, community. The Leftovers imagines how a New England town (Mapleton) would attempt to make sense of a Rapture-like catastrophe, the disappearance of many but not all members of the human race, which happens at random. The overtly supernatural, a new element of Perrotta’s work, exists alongside the suburban realism he’s made his name on. As a result of ungainly genre-mashing, his simpleton diction, and the story’s wobbly pacing, there’s a sort of stakes-lessness that ruins both the fun and the darkness of The Leftovers.

The many residents of Mapleton lead unenlightened, stale, colorless lives. Humor, which has always served as Perrotta’s characters standard defense mechanism, is present in The Leftovers, but it’s scaled back. When it is employed, it offers little levity. At his best, Perrotta has a strong command of the kind of humor, used most often during scenes of dialogue, that reveals, aphoristically, a character’s truest self. His previous novels feature characters whose worldviews come through clearly in their sense of humor, their ranges and tones. This quality is largely absent from The Leftovers. More significantly, his writing style lacks a sense of forward-motion, or the kick-in-the-gut rush of a sentence that sings. Verveless, Perrotta’s prose rarely ever lights up, and is only occasionally charged with the kind of quotidian detail that good art magnifies.

Appropriate, then, that Stephen King, a writer often bastardized for his non-literary sensibilities, wrote the laudatory review of The Leftovers that ran on the cover of The New York Times Book Review recently. King’s most blurbably direct, all-or-nothing assertion: “Perrotta has delivered a troubling disquisition on how ordinary people react to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to heal, and the unobtrusive ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism.” An important distinction, I believe, should be made between disquisitions and exposés. Disquisitions may not necessarily bear the quality of revelation. All Perrotta reveals in The Leftovers is a sad willingness to forgo the challenge of writing The New Suburban Story, or The New Post-Apocalyptic Story, hell, even The New Tom Perrotta Story. Especially discouraging is how The Leftovers’s omniscient P.O.V.-shifting structure is the same as that of his previous novel, the similarly tiresome The Abstinence Teacher.

Criticism should do what Perrotta’s most favorable critics suggest his novels accomplish: a peeling back of the layers at the surface-level. A novel, and the response it gets, should be a work of excavation. Many, like King’s, read like bad flap copy, the work of an unpaid intern. Perrotta’s business-savvy decision to dip his feet in the world of genre writing was covered eloquently at The Millions. Few reviewers, however, have interrogated Perrotta’s sentences, those perfectly safe, unshapely constructions that, like his characters in Little Children and The Leftovers, stumble toward their oblivion. Lifeless. His book, and its empty-headed critical reception, then, can be seen as a reflection of the rapturous disappearance of genre fiction ingenuity, veteran writer risk-taking, and critical attention spans. Sentences and readers alike suffer.

Something lost, nothing gained.  

(text by: John Francisconi)

1. emmagonline posted this