Author sets up a culture war

WATERTOWN, MASS. —  Some drank themselves nearly to death. Others spiraled downward on their own. Still others spent years spinning in neutral, cursing their studio overlords.

By and large, literary writers working for Hollywood have not had great luck at it. The character of Barton Fink, the pretentious playwright of the Coen brothers film who provokes a murder and a fiery inferno without producing much decent dialogue, is a comic exaggeration of a long, uneasy tradition.

Until Tom Perrotta came along, that is. Perrotta, whose novels “Election” and “Little Children” were made into acclaimed films by Alexander Payne and Todd Field, respectively, is now most of the way through adapting his new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” for directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the couple behind last year’s hit “Little Miss Sunshine.”

It’s a sign of the excitement over Perrotta’s work that the screenplay was almost done before the novel, which looks at a small-town culture war between a liberal sex-ed teacher and a group of evangelical Christians, was published last week. If he’s had trouble with the film world, at least the more literary, boutique-scaled side he’s dealt with, he’s keeping it to himself.

“I know what it’s like to spend two years alone in my room writing a novel,” Perrotta, 46, said at a bustling restaurant here, about a mile from his home and about midway between the blue-collar New Jersey of his youth and the leafy suburban world of his recent novels. “But the friction of working closely with talented people is exciting, and I’ve learned a lot.”

Short, bespectacled, wearing cuffed jeans and the kind of jacket favored by indie-rockers in the ‘90s and gas station attendants in the ‘70s, in person he lacks the smugness he sometimes projects in photographs. Instead, he’s soft-spoken, sensitive, almost self-protective.

He’s been called an American Chekhov, a compassionate satirist and an heir to Cheever and Updike. To detractors, he’s a lightweight who’s perfect for shallow Hollywood.

More than anything, though, his work is defined not by a type of character or a setting in the suburbs but by a tone of voice: cutting and observed with a kind of oracular detachment, but with forgiveness and respect for old-fashioned decency. It’s also a tone, rooted in realism, that doesn’t draw attention to itself.

In a funny way, the premises and the novels themselves seem to be rendered by a different writer.

“The setups to my stories are often more satirical,” he said, “but the execution isn’t. In the course of writing, my sense of the characters deepens, and the story becomes something different from what I intended.”

The humor often comes from the minor characters -- in the new novel, two witty and cynical gay men, a svelte and obnoxious “virginity consultant” and other borderline stereotypes -- but he aims for more with his protagonists.

This attempt at synthesis makes writing, Perrotta said, a “struggle for the tone. If it works right, the reader should be a little off balance: These characters do unexpected things and sometimes grow out of what you think their limits are.” It’s a combination of wit and “moral seriousness” he said he learned in part from the work of Tobias Wolff, with whom he studied for his MFA at Syracuse University.

This empathy makes him defensive when people jeer at his admittedly flawed characters, as he sees when he reads the “moralistic” reviews on Amazon and other public forums. “Like, ‘I would never do that,’ or ‘Why should I read about people who make these stupid decisions?’ Or ‘I don’t know anybody like that.’ ”

It makes him wince a bit. “And my thought as a novelist is: ‘Yeah, you do. You might even be one.’ ”

Values voters

It was during the 2004 presidential elections that Perrotta, living then, as now, on one of Boston’s liberal fringes with his wife and kids, realized he had no idea who these “values voters” were who had supposedly swung an election for a widely unloved president presiding over an unpopular war. “Like a lot of secular people,” Perrotta recalled, “it was very convenient for me to write off the religious right as hypocrites or loonies.”

Raised Catholic, the novelist had very little experience with Protestant evangelicals.

“Around here there was this constant refrain, ‘Who are these people?’ I felt, as a novelist, I should know, and I didn’t. . . . I felt like I was playing catch-up.”

Although there’s no shortage of sexually tinged wedge issues with which to set up a novel, Perrotta pretty quickly gravitated to sex education. “People like reading about sex,” he said. “I certainly like thinking about sex. Gay marriage and abortion are central issues in the American culture war, but they’re not universal ones.” Whereas everyone, he points out, has a sex life, whether libertinism or the kind that’s defined by its absence. “And everyone has to make decisions about sexual behavior.”

Framing the issue ended up being just the start of his task as novelist.

“It’s easy to set up an ideological warfare novel,” he said, describing his admiration for Updike’s “Rabbit Redux,” with the collision of its conservative title character, a hippie-chick suburban teenager and a black militant. “What’s harder is to get somewhere, somewhere that’s believable but doesn’t just reproduce what you and your audience already know. Novels just insist somehow that the personal is really what determines our choices, even if they’re structured by these larger issues.”

To get to know the Christian world better, Perrotta attended a few services, read the Bible every day and spent a lot of time on evangelical websites and blogs. “It helped me get a sense of the language and the dilemmas.”

Part of what he found was a large number of Christian men who were recovering from drugs, drink or bad marriages, struggling family men searching for respite from a winner-take-all culture.

These experiences -- being approached with, “you’ve done 12-step, right?” -- led him to the character of Tim, a deeply sincere soccer coach with a hangdog manner and a long history of bad decisions. He becomes an early antagonist to Ruth, the sex-ed teacher terrified that her daughter will be asked to pray after soccer games.

“For about 100 pages it seems like Ruth’s novel,” Perrotta said. “A comic novel, with clear good guys and bad guys. But that basically stops the minute Tim walks onto the stage,” and the reader sees him “from the inside.” And the book becomes something less frothy and more complicated.

The big break

Like a lot of MFA grads, Perrotta was resigned to a life of teaching at a small college in a part of the country he’d otherwise never live in and reading obscurely published short stories to other over-educated literary types at writers conferences. But it was at one of those conferences (the prestigious Bread Loaf at Middlebury College) in the mid-’90s that Perrotta had what he calls his “Cinderella moment”: A writer friend of the producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa of Bona Fide Productions saw him read from his novel “The Wishbones” and told them to check out his work.

When they read the stories in “Bad Haircut” and called Perrotta, he told them he had a manuscript, sitting in a drawer, that had baffled publishing types. “He said they’d had trouble because people couldn’t figure out if it was young adult or literary,” Berger said. That novel, “Election,” came out a year after the Reese Witherspoon-Matthew Broderick film went into production.

Perrotta said his approach hasn’t changed a whole lot since.

“I keep trying to expand the territory that this kind of comic novel can encompass,” he said. “And maybe in the course of that happening it gets slightly less comic.”

Although his first novels were set in New Jersey, where he grew up as the son of a postman and a secretary, neither of whom had attended college, his more recent books have less blue-collar tang. “I’ve become less autobiographical and more public in my concerns,” he said.

But some subjects keep pulling him back.

“Freud believed that what happens to you in your first three years of life determines your adult personality,” he said with a laugh. “While I feel like what happens to you between 9th and 12th grade defines you. It seems important for me to know what my characters were like in high school, no matter how old they are. It’s really like a reflex for me.”

Friends in Hollywood

And high school -- whether in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” or “Election” -- can be a great subject for American films. Still, it makes you wonder: Why has Perrotta had so much luck with the movies, not only in getting his novels adapted, but having them made by the right people?

“He has a great knack for being a populist, in touch with mainstream culture, but elevated by his literary quality,” said Yerxa. Goldman admires Perrotta’s ability to “jump into people’s heads,” as well as his timeliness. With “The Abstinence Teacher,” “it seems like an important movie for the moment. It’s exploring issues very much in the air, questions about religion, the gulf that exists, and navigating that gap.”

The author thinks his Hollywood-readiness has to do with his style, which is apparently artless. “I’m not a great writer of sentences,” he conceded. “I have a good ear for dialogue, I know how to structure a story. I labor over the prose; I struggle against a kind of flatness. But what saves me is a sense of rhythm, or something.

“There’s sort of a blue-collar thing: I have a profound allergy to a certain kind of eloquence or lyricism. I know what I want my stuff to sound like. The real hard work is getting my characters to a place where they can start talking. Then I’m in my element.”

Of course, at any moment, Perrotta’s winning streak could be broken and he could become another sad East Coast writer who knocks those sunburned barbarians on “the Coast.” But for now, he’s found a happy distance and plans to continue working as a novelist outside Boston.

Will he tackle another hot-button theme for his next novel, to continue a run that’s included politics, pedophilia and the resurgence of the religious right? He’s afraid it’s not that simple.

“You have an idea, it grabs you, and you do it,” he said. “Whether it’s good for you or not.”

Tom Perrotta reads at Book Soup today.

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