Parenthetical.net

In a recent post I set myself a challenge to read one grown-up book for every 2 or 3 YA books I read this year, to give myself the same chance at a literary lens for adulthood that I had for childhood/adolescence.

For my first meal at the grown-up table, I picked The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta (author of Election, among other things).

Ruth is a divorced mother of two and teacher of human sexuality at a small-town public school. Despite her own depressing lack of a sex life, her personal credo is that “pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power” — so you can imagine the kind of sex ed she teaches, and have probably already guessed where her career will end up by the last chapter.

Tim is a divorced father of one, a recovering alcoholic and sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n roll-er, and a recently born-again Christian. He’s a member of the Tabernacle, the new fundamentalist church in town, which is shocked — shocked! — by Ruth’s assertion that “some people enjoy oral sex,” and convince the school board to force her to teach a pre-packaged abstinence curriculum.

Tim also happens to coach Ruth’s daughter’s soccer team, and one day he feels moved to lead the team in prayer. Ruth gets predictably pissed…and off the plot goes from there. (Perrotta is good about not portraying the Christians as whackjobs, by the way — though maybe I just think that because I have more stake in Ruth’s portrayal than in the Tabernacle’s. Christians who’ve read it, please weigh in!)

It’s a book about honesty, really — how to figure out who you are and live a life that’s true to both your morality and your identity. Unfortunately, the end didn’t provide satisfying answers to those questions for the main characters. As they made their last choices, were they content with them? Maybe it’s just that I liked the characters so much I wanted more time with them.

The moment that underscored the biggest difference for me between this and YA had nothing to do with any of the sex or parenting or big choices. It was a throwaway line, from a character you only meet once. Ruth is trying to convince a fellow soccer parent, a Muslim, to support her in her official complaint about Tim’s prayer session:

“Do you know what my name is?” he inquired, pulling a paper towel from the dispenser. “My first name?”

“It’s Hussein, isn’t it?”

The doctor smiled sadly. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Ramsey, I think my family and I will sit this one out.”

And that’s the end of the scene. No, “Hey, you know, because of September 11th and all! With the persecution!” The book assumes that we, as reasonably intelligent adults who’ve occasionally read the news in the last seven years, get it. Obviously there are plenty of adult books in which you can’t turn a page without getting bonked with another anvil, and there are plenty of YA books that do expect a lot from their readers. But in general, you can’t expect as much ability to infer from young adults; they just aren’t there yet.* It was cool to read a book that assumed I had a grown-up brain.

* I remember a passage in The Night Journey, by Kathryn Lasky, which I adored as a kid. A Jewish family is escaping early 20th century Russia, and they’ve enlisted the help of a haunted old man whose family was killed in the pogroms. The young protagonist, Rachel, is dying to find out what the old man’s deal is — what, exactly, happened to him to make him so hollow and disturbed? One day she finds him looking at a dead, mangled squirrel family, and he says, “The father fled.” That drove me crazy — wtf, he was that fucked up because he saw some dead squirrels?? It took me years of re-readings to figure out that it was a metaphor, duh.