Little Children: A Novel

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		Little Children: A Novel
		Little Children: A Novel

基本信息·出版社：St. Martin's Paperbacks
·页码：336 页
·出版日期：2006年10月
·ISBN：0312990324
·条形码：9780312990329
·版本：2006-10-03
·装帧：简装
·开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：身为人母电影导读

内容简介 Book Description
Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with the same rich feeling and dark humor of Perrotta’s previous novels, LITTLE CHILDEN exposes a surprising side of a familiar world.

Tom Perrotta’s thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There’s Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed “The Prom King” by the moms at the playground, and his wife Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there’s Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she’s become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband Richard, who is more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child. And then there’s Mary Ann, who has life all figured out, down to a scheduled roll in the hay with her husband every Tuesday at 9PM.

They all raise their kids in the kind of quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen—until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could ever have imagined.

From Publishers Weekly
The characters in this intelligent, absorbing tale of suburban angst are constrained and defined by their relationship to children. There's Sarah, an erstwhile bisexual feminist who finds herself an unhappy mother and wife to a branding consultant addicted to Internet porn. There's Todd, a handsome ex-jock and stay-at-home dad known to neighborhood housewives as the Prom King, who finds in house-husbandry and reveries about his teenage glory days a comforting alternative to his wife's demands that he pass the bar and get on with a law career. There's Mary Ann, an uptight supermom who schedules sex with her husband every Tuesday at nine and already has her well-drilled four-year-old on the inside track to Harvard. And there's Ronnie, a pedophile whose return from prison throws the school district into an uproar, and his mother, May, who still harbors hopes that her son will turn out well after all. In the midst of this universe of mild to fulminating family dysfunction, Sarah and Todd drift into an affair that recaptures the passion of adolescence, that fleeting liminal period of freedom and possibility between the dutiful rigidities of childhood and parenthood. Perrotta (Election; Joe College; etc.) views his characters with a funny, acute and sympathetic eye, using the well-observed antics of preschoolers as a telling backdrop to their parents' botched transitions into adulthood. Once again, he proves himself an expert at exploring the roiling psychological depths beneath the placid surface of suburbia.

From The New Yorker
The eponymous children in this satirical novel are actually adults who, chafing at the burdens of parenthood, try to re-create their unencumbered youth. Sarah, an overeducated young homemaker, likens her tantrum-prone daughter to a "brooding Russian epileptic" out of Dostoevsky, and pines for lost college days of feminism and bisexuality. While her husband orders used panties online, she has furtive sex with a stay-at-home dad whose repeated failure to pass the bar has earned him the contempt of his gorgeous wife. The humor is sometimes cruel, but Perrotta never betrays the complexity of his characters. For all Sarah's sins—neglecting her child, wallowing in romantic delusions—there's something almost brave about her refusal to join the supermoms drilling their toddlers with dreams of Harvard, and about her yearning for more than "a painfully ordinary life."

From Booklist
Perrotta sent up the foibles of high-schoolers in Election (1998) and of Ivy Leaguers in Joe College (2000). Here, in warmly humorous prose, he takes on the thirtysomething parents of young children. Handsome stay-at-home dad Todd, dubbed the Prom King by the moms at the playground, secretly grooves to Raffi and loves staging horrific train wrecks with his young son; he has flunked the bar exam twice and can sense his wife's increasing exasperation, but he can't force himself to study. Although Sarah has a Ph.D. in feminist studies, she is completely flummoxed by her toddler's temper tantrums and her husband's seeming infatuation with a pornographic Web site. Sarah and Todd fall into an unlikely affair, and although they know they are acting out of desperation to escape problems on the home front, their relationship is full of electric sex and genuine emotion. Perrotta, with a light but sure hand, expertly sketches the angst of the playground set and then amps up his material with a subplot involving a child molester. A fast-reading, wholly engaging novel.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Joanne Wilkinson

Book Dimension
length: (cm)17.2 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)10.9
作者简介 Tom Perrotta is the author of several works of fiction, including JOE COLLEGE and ELECTION, which was made into the acclaimed 1999 movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. He lives with his wife and two children in Belmont, Massachusetts.
媒体推荐 Reviews
1.“Tom Perrotta…is like an American Nick Hornby: companionable and humane, lighthearted and surprisingly touching.”
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　—Newsweek

2.“Tom Perrotta has to be considered one of our true genius satirists. Little Children is a great book. It’s both an indictment of and an elegy to that odd sociological construct known as suburban America. I was enthralled by every page, and damn if I didn’t find myself wishing I’d written it.”
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Shutter Island

3.“An accomplished comic novelist extends his range brilliantly. Perrotta’s best.”
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　—Kirkus Reviews

4.“An absorbing, fleshed-out portrait of an American male edging toward adulthood by crossing seemingly rigid social boundaries.”—The New York Times Book Review

5.“Proves yet again that Perrotta’s novels are sheer pleasure.”—San Francisco Chronicle

6.“An overwhelmingly pleasing book.”
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　—The New York Times


7."With this, his fifth book, Tom Perrotta has to be considered one of our true genius satirists. Little Children is a great book. Hilarious (I haven’t laughed out loud so much over a book in years) but also deeply compassionate and, at times, terrifying. It’s both an indictment of, and an elegy to, that odd sociological construct known as suburban America. I was enthralled by every page, and damn if I didn’t find myself wishing I’d written it."
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　- Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River

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