Little Children (#33)

We're kicking this "Entertainment" Blog old skool today... books!   

After getting off to a quick start, I have had watched my lead slowly slip away... not that I check more than twenty-five fifteen ten eight two times a day... and this morning, for the first time since the polls opened, I have slipped to 2nd... with 3rd place definitely within my sight!  (UPDATE:  Yeesh!  I'm already tied for 3rd) Thanks to those who have voted for Whine & Cheese in the Best GLBT Entertainment/Gossip Blog... there's still time to vote (until Dec 17th)... though apparently you can't vote more than once, what's up with that?!!?  But I refuse to pander!

So how do you like the naked people on the cover of my latest book, Little Children by Tom Perrotta!?! 

Generally, I tend to avoid movie covers of books that I read... but c'mon, I couldn't really pass up the sweaty and bare bodies of Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson.  Likewise, I usually try to read a book well before it's a movie (or, at least, before it's released) so I can have my own mental images of the characters, not the Hollywood versions.  But again, sweaty and naked Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson are not necessarily that bad of a thing.

Anyhow, the book got onto my radar around the time the movie came out and particularly when it started getting award buzz. It seemed as if I would like the movie, so that made me research the book.  It was then I found out that Perrotta had also written Election, which likewise had been made into a well-received film starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick.  Fast-forward a year or so... never read the book (or saw the movie for that matter) and then during a couple of recent book-centric emails with Jen, she mentioned Perrotta as a favorite... so to make a long story, well okay... long... that recommendation provided the impetus to buy the book... and more impressively, given the length of my "to be read" list, read it.

And I absolutely ate it up... granted the font size was pretty darn big, but a 50 page/day pace is still about the speediest it got for me in this year's reading challenge.  The book is an often satiric look at the underbelly of suburban life... centering around two stay-at-home (and married) parents, Sarah and Todd, who start an affair.  Oh, then there's the pesky new neighbor... a recently released child molester/possible murderer moving in with his elderly mother. 

It is a smart and sharp book... and many actual little children inhabit the book... at least one interpretation of the title comes very early in the book and is one of my favorite passages:

Not that they would, but if any of the other mothers had asked how it was that Sarah, of all people, had ended up married, living in the suburbs, and caring full-time for a small child, she would have blamed it all on a moment of weakness.  At least that was how she described it to herself, though the explanation always seemed a bit threadbare.  After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all pretending that they'd actually made some sort of choice.

Very good stuff!!  In recommending books to help fill the impending absence of your favorite TV shows due to the writers' strike, Entertainment Weekly recently selected Little Children as a replacement for Desperate Housewives.  That's oversimplifying it in a Hollywood pitch kind of way, but I'll have to admit it's pretty accurate.

While this likely won't top my "best" list, it was one of the "most entertaining" reads of the year.  I should stop being snooty and differentiating  between those things... particularly when it's that latter group that I most often unconditionally recommend to others... though my puritanical friends/readers (wait, do I even have those?!!) might want to skip this one... since, at least for me, I found myself sympathizing with a child molester and rooting on infidelity.

2007 10K Reading Challenge:  + 353 pages (Total Pages: 10909 pages) 

Comments

[Gail]

Surprisingly, I didn't know the movie was based on a book. I watched the movie because it was Jackie Earl Haley's comeback. I thought it was his performance that made the character sympathetic, but from your comment, that was how he was written.