The Biblio File

I had been looking forward to reading The Abstinence Teacher, given all the press it got: interviews with Perotta on NPR and BBC, a profile article in the NY Times. And, the premise of the story certainly holds the promise of interesting conflict. Ruth, a divorced, suburban sex-ed teacher is being pressured both at work and through her daughter’s soccer team by an evangelical church that is taking root in the town. They challenge her curriculum at the school, and the coach of her daughter’s team, Tim, is a recovering addict and prominent member of this church. After a particularly emotional victory, Tim leads his team of middle school girls, including Ruth’s daughter, in prayer. This causes the worlds of Ruth and Tim to intersect, and causes a crisis of faith, so to speak, in each character. With a plot like this, you can either end up with a book that challenges conventional (even polemic) perceptions of faith, a book that takes the mundane aspects of suburban living and twists them, blows them up until they represent bigger, more universal truths about how we live and choices we make, a story that compels us to identify with people who are different than we are and, in the process, leaves us different than when we were before we started. Or, you can end up with a TV movie of the week. Sadly, this book is much closer to the latter.

The overwhelming feeling I had when reading this book was that I was hearing a writer at work. Or, rather, an imaginer at work. Ruth and Tim felt like what someone would imagine representatives of these two opposing sides would be like, rather than fully formed people. It seems obvious from their first meeting that they will eventually come together (probably romantically) and the plot seems manipulated to make this happen, even in spite of what little character has been established. (In one scene, Tim shows up at Ruth’s door after having lied to her about her daughter, she slaps him across the face, and then with her next motion invites him into her house and serves him coffee.) Half-way through I started to wonder if Perotta was playing with caricature or archetype to some end. If he was, I hadn’t figured it out by the last page, and was not moved enough by the characters to parse through it again.