Tom Perrotta, the man routinely labelled “the American Nick Hornby” for his ability to write novels in which even dysfunctional characters prompt a warm glow within the reader, has spent the last 20 years training a gently arched eyebrow on the lives of ordinary suburban folk.
With his latest novel, Mrs Fletcher, he’s arching it at the effects of online pornography, revealing the viewing habits of both a mother and a teenage son. In this way, he tackles a hot topic in his usual style — peeking behind the white picket fences and freshly mown lawns belonging to that most mythical beast, the average American.
His stories are eminently relatable, which is at least one reason why so many of them have gone on to enjoy screen adaptations — among them the 1999 college comedy Election with Reese Witherspoon; 2006’s Little Children, which featured Kate Winslet as a bored housewife looking to alleviate that boredom through infidelity; and most recently, for HBO, The Leftovers, a quasi-post-apocalyptic tale starring Justin Theroux.
It should come as little surprise, then, that Mrs Fletcher is already being adapted for television. Ostensibly a coming-of-age novel that focuses on two people in very different chapters of their lives, it features Eve Fletcher, a divorced mother in her mid-forties, and her son, Brendan, about to depart for university. Eve is worrying about her imminent empty nest; Brendan is looking forward to independence and hedonism.
Perrotta is good at writing young American males, and 18-year-old Brendan boasts all the emotional intelligence of someone who drags their knuckles on the ground when they walk, a man who has had the misfortune of growing up in a world of online porn, and so can only initiate real-life sex in the way he has seen it portrayed on screen. On campus, this will get him into trouble.
His mother, meanwhile, is late to online porn, but finds herself an enthusiastic adopter. Having been told by a secret admirer that she is a “milf”, she avidly researches her new peer group online, which prompts her to initiate a sexual liaison with a female co-worker, the reality of which pales alongside the fantasy. Mrs Fletcher ends up as a cautionary tale.
“I’ve been interested in the effects of Internet porn on our sexual culture for a long time now,” Perrotta says from his home just outside Boston one early April morning. Having already written about the subject in Little Children, he wanted to delve deeper into it here, but realised — wisely — that people wouldn’t be interested in reading about a middle-aged man’s exploits as much as they would a woman’s.
“I feel that women’s characters are far more interesting,” he says, “especially now that we are at this cultural turning point. Women’s voices are stronger; their experiences are at the centre of our discussions.”
Writing from the perspective of a woman is dangerous territory for the male novelist, of course, something the author was all too aware of. “But my agent is a woman, my editor is a woman, my publisher. My wife is my first reader. So this isn’t a territory I go into blindly.”
What many of us do go into blindly, he suggests, is online sex tourism. Every sexual peccadillo is now available to us at the click of a mouse. “It informs us in the way that previous generations would have considered unimaginable,” he says. “It’s possible now for everyone to know things that only the most sophisticated libertines would have had any inkling of previously. But we don’t really examine it, or discuss it too much.”
In the hands of a different writer, Mrs Fletcher might have offered an unflinching look into where such predilections can lead us, but Perrotta — the American Nick Hornby, remember — has ultimately written a gentle comedy here, one in which, by the book’s conclusion, the characters have not fallen into pits of pestilence but rather grown from valuable lessons learned.
“What I wanted to write about was how people can do bad things and get into trouble, yes, but ultimately improve, and go on to find their own place in the world,” he says.
Perrotta, 56, always wanted to be a writer. He grew up in New Jersey, and went on to attend Yale. For the next 10 years, he stayed on at the university where he taught creative writing while attempting to break into creative writing himself, specifically as a novelist.
It took several attempts before he was finally published, in 1997, with the short story collection, Bad Haircut. After Joe College in 2000, another college-set novel, his work was labelled “lad lit” before he became more of a cuddly Richard Russo figure — writing engrossing fiction about men and women alike, all dealing with the messy stuff of ordinary life.
The fact that so many of his books have made it to film, he suggests, is luck. “I was lucky to have my first experience in film with Election, made into a masterpiece by director Alexander Payne. And once that world was open to me, I suppose I did move into it purposefully.”
He has had a hand in each of the screenplays of his books, and although he insists that he doesn’t write with one eye on how they will look on the screen, the winning simplicity of his writing style certainly lends itself to film in a way that, for example, the work of Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartt — both of whose books have failed to make the transition — don’t.
I remind Perrotta that he once said he never saw himself writing a masterpiece. He laughs. “I said that? Well, I guess it’s true I can’t see myself writing a 600-page epic about something very self-consciously important with a capital I. Those writers who tend to bowl you over with their sentences — that’s not what I do, I guess. Instead, I just want to write one really good book after another, and build up a cumulative body of work.”
The adaptation of The Leftovers was unusual for US TV because it was so spectacularly dark. Perrotta was involved, but played distinct second fiddle to the show’s main writer Damon Lindelof, who gave it an edge largely absent from the original book. At first, Perrotta says, he was “shocked and troubled to see my work translated in such a way, though it did become exhilarating afterwards.”
Nevertheless, he wanted more control on his next foray into TV, which is why he is going to adapt Mrs Fletcher for HBO himself. “I’m going to run the show this time,” he smiles — not just with pride in his voice, but also perhaps relief.
The independent