“Some people enjoy it.” In Tom Perrotta’s excellent new novel, The Abstinence
Teacher, these four little words, uttered by Stonewood Heights’
high school health teacher Ruth Ramsey, unleash a controversy that
ultimately results in the school adopting an abstinence-based sex-ed
curriculum, and Ruth getting reassigned to teach math, a subject where
she will never again be called upon to field a student’s question about
why anyone would ever do something so disgusting as to have oral
sex.
The eminently likeable Ruth believes that “Pleasure Is Good, Shame
Is Bad, and Knowledge Is Power,” a personal credo that is increasingly
at odds with the tenor of her hometown, where a small but influential
new church has “begun a crusade to cleanse Stonewood Heights of all
manner of godlessness and moral decay, as if this sleepy bedroom
community was an abomination unto the Lord, Sodom with good schools and
a 24-hour supermarket.”
Ruth is unwillingly drawn into conflict with church members, first
as they challenge her curriculum, and later as she butts heads with the
religious-but-still-kinda-sexy Tim Mason, with whom she has an
irresistible chemistry.
Perrotta’s angle here, and what makes this book more than just a wry
study in the attraction of opposites, is that the fictional town of
Stonewood Heights is no predictably narrow-minded and conservative
small town. Rather it is a “well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal
by any means, but not especially conservative, either.” Ruth never
expects to wake up one morning into an environment in which religious
attitudes govern what she teaches; it’s a shock to her, a sudden
hearkening back to a more repressive time, and she doesn’t take it
seriously until it’s too late.
Perrotta is a master at weaving social commentary into a deceptively
straightforward, even mundane narrative (see: Little Children,
Election). Here, his prose is so deft and funny (one character
“looked the way he always did in the morning, like he’d been up half
the night sweating on the toilet”) that it almost comes as a surprise
to realize that the book you’re so enjoying is actually a pointed
commentary on the increasingly evangelical nature of American religious
life, and a cautionary tale about the effects such evangelism can have
on the unwitting rest of us.