The AbstinenceTteacher

The Abstinence Teacher
Tom Perrotta
St. martin’s Press
358 Pages





I got turned on to this book through Nick Hornby’s column “what I am reading” in The Believer. I am happy I did. Perrottas 4 previous books have all been well received and at least one, “Election” was made into a rather average Reese Witherspoon Matthew Broderick vehicle. Perrottas book “Little Children” from 2004 appeared on a little people’s best books list and is worth going back to if you have not caught it. He has flown under my radar screen but this book will make me go back and revisit those. It is all Spring and it is now timne to leave the Russian writers and St. Louis suicide weather behind.

“The Abstinence Teacher” is a plainly written book about sex education, the culture wars, suburbia, kids soccer and evangelical Christianity. When typing this I was shocked about how the five things in that prior sentence seem to go together. I could rattle off a few more including Starbucks, yoga and S.U.V.’s. All of them having something to be said for themselves but when looked at all together in one sentence... it makes me queasy.

The book has two main characters. the first is a middle aged, divorced, liberal, agenda-ized mother of two girls who is a health teach in a public high school. the second is a male recovering scar from 70’s culture, former bass player, dead head, alcoholic, druggy who turns his life around through his involvement in the local evangelical church and the personal ministry of their preacher Pastor Scott. Both characters are smartly drawn and first come into contact when after a particularly hectic soccer game he leads the kids in a prayer after the game which leads to her shrieking at him and leading a parents insurrection again against this in the soccer league.

She has some issues with Christianity (especially the evangelical kind) after her health class (and when did we start linking sex education with “health”) gets her in trouble when she opines in regard to one girls obvious distaste for the topic of oral sex by saying four words; “some people like it”. This brings a fire storm from the girls mother and her church who crusade to get abstinence education installed in the schools curriculum and we follow her somewhat less then stellar attempt at keeping her job and swallowing her pride to teach it.

As a parent and someone who tries to be a Christian the subject of abstinence as sex education interests me. I know abstinence is the only Chrisitian answer to premarital sex but... I also remember being a teen ager and it just seems so absurd that you would teach it in public school to the exclusion of everything else. I mean if that is so important to me shouldn’t I be bucking up for a good Christian school to send my kid to rather then expect that from public education? But... I am a commie. What do I know?

The characters are well drawn and she has the mandatory gay boyfriends and we get to deal tangentally with their relationship issues. the two main characters are undeniably drawn to one another just as they are repulsed by their intolerance on both sides regarding the others beliefs. In the end the book succeeds because it points out through these broken characters that people are really fragile and yet are capable of and indeed entitled to some sublime and beautiful moments as they stumble brokenly through life searching for meaning and connection in jobs, religion, family, sex and whatever else they can find. Even as the book winds towards it’s hopelessly logical conclusion, it never quite gets there but implies a lot of greatness, pain and life that lies ahead.
So far I am calling it the best read of the year. 8 Slingers on the 10 scale.