The National Post<\/a><\/i> profiles Tom Perrotta, author of Election<\/i>, Little Children<\/i> and The Abstinence Teacher<\/a><\/i> \u2014 all of which have been made into films or, in the case of that last title, are about to be<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n The Abstinence Teacher is a funny two-hander about people on opposite sides of the culture war. Tim is a recently remarried soccer coach and screw-up who\u2019s valiantly trying to correct his mistakes with the help of the Tabernacle, a church growing in power in Stonewood Heights, the fictitious all-American town where the novel is set. Ruth is a single mother and human sexuality teacher who has come under fire from the Tabernacle for teaching that \u201cpleasure is good.\u201d As usual, Perrotta\u2019s protagonists have a hard time staying clothed. \u201cInfidelities allow you to write about adult characters, even married characters, and catch them at a moment when they\u2019re in flux,\u201d he says, observing that Updike, Tolstoy and F. Scott Fitzgerald trod similar ground. \u201cWho you fall in love with is both a very real thing and a metaphor for irrevocable life choices. \u2018They got married and lived happily ever after\u2019 is not a line you\u2019ll likely see in my work.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1993, Perrotta, then teaching at Harvard, wrote Election. No one would publish it, and he figured he\u2019d wear chalk on his sleeves forever. \u201cI was a composition teacher, struggling financially, and thought I\u2019d go on to an academic career,\u201d he says. He produced two more unheralded works of fiction, Bad Haircut, a fairly autobiographical collection of stories set in \u201970s New Jersey, and The Wishbones, about a greying wedding singer who doesn\u2019t want to settle down. It was a Hollywood producer who turned Perrotta into a successful commodity. After hearing him read at a college book store, she helped make Election, then unpublished, into the hot film of 1999.<\/p>\n \u201cTotal fluke,\u201d he says of his book\u2019s success on the big screen, which he followed up on by publishing Joe College the next year. \u201cThat experience, to say the least, changed things.\u201d<\/p>\n Perrotta left Harvard, which allowed him to concentrate on Little Children, his 2004 novel about the secret lives of the denizens of an outwardly ordinary neighbourhood. \u201cI thought I had a straightforward comic proposition \u2014 a sexy love story set on a playground, the least sexy place in the world,\u201d he says. \u201cThe story, however, wound up telling me what it wanted to become.\u201d<\/p>\n It became a tale of longing and violence told with a dry wit, and then, in 2006, it was transformed into an Oscar-nominated film starring Kate Winslet. But Perrotta isn\u2019t quite ready to go Hollywood\u2013not yet.<\/p>\n \u201cDoing films is fun because it\u2019s a collaborative process, but I couldn\u2019t wait to work on this book,\u201d he says of The Abstinence Teacher, which was inspired both by the Christian right\u2019s influence on the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush and Perrotta\u2019s years on the sidelines of the Belmont Freeze [his 10-year-old son\u2019s soccer team]. And though the novel presses a few hot buttons \u2014 gay marriage, abortion and religion in school \u2014 it remains rooted in Perrottaland. \u201cI knew that a foray into Christian sex was going to be funny,\u201d he says. \u201cI seem to be able to find humour in these things.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n OCT 14 UPDATE: The New York Times<\/a><\/i> profiles Perrotta, too:<\/p>\n TOM PERROTTA, perhaps best known for the pointed, celebrated film adaptations of his novels \u201cElection\u201d and \u201cLittle Children,\u201d might seem out of place in a crowd of 300 or so young people gathered at an evangelical Christian church in the strip-mall suburbs of northern New Jersey for a rally on why they shouldn\u2019t have sex before marriage. . . .<\/p>\n Early in \u201cThe Abstinence Teacher,\u201d which Mr. Perrotta is adapting into a screenplay for the directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the husband-and-wife team behind \u201cLittle Miss Sunshine<\/a>,\u201d the author depicts a similar scene. In it a 28-year-old woman who \u201cwasn\u2019t just blond and pretty; she was hot\u201d boasts of her virginity while lecturing the students on venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies. In a titillating finale, she promises them that when she finally has sex on her wedding night, \u201cmark my words, people \u2014 it is going to be soooo good, oh my God, better than you can even imagine.\u201d . . .<\/p>\n \u201cThe Abstinence Teacher\u201d kicks off when Ruth Ramsey, a sex-education teacher and divorced mother of two young daughters, makes an offhand remark to her students about oral sex that draws the ire of local evangelical church members. Seeking to placate them, the school board invites a \u201cvirginity consultant\u201d to supervise Ruth in class. The rest of the novel revolves around the budding relationship between Ruth and Tim Mason, a newly remarried soccer coach and recovering drug addict who has recently found God and wants to share him. . . .<\/p>\n Raised Roman Catholic (he has since lapsed), he was exposed to the self-abnegating form of religion that the evangelicals, he said, had turned on its head, particularly in regard to sex. \u201cCatholic theology is that sex should be for procreation,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this evangelical culture really embraces orgasms and pleasure. I was really interested in that strain of Christianity that didn\u2019t want to fight American culture and that\u2019s a vibrant, prosperous and actually kind of sexy culture.\u201d . . .<\/p>\n While he was working on \u201cLittle Children\u201d and attending his daughter\u2019s soccer games, an idea popped into his head. \u201cThe soccer coach,\u201d he wrote on an index card. \u201cA man is upset to see the coach of his 8-year-old son\u2019s team praying after the game. Why is he angry?\u201d<\/p>\n That brief note eventually morphed into a pivotal early scene in \u201cThe Abstinence Teacher,\u201d with the sexes changed. Ruth Ramsey attends a nail-biting soccer match in which her 10-year-old daughter, Maggie, makes a crucial play. In the jubilant aftermath, Tim Mason and another coach lead the girls in a prayer. Ruth goes ballistic.<\/p>\n But as in \u201cLittle Children,\u201d in which he gave depth to a disaffected and uninspired young mother (as well as to the aging mother of a pedophile), here Mr. Perrotta takes a simplistic character who on first appearances is easily dismissible and makes him hard not to like. . . .<\/p>\n