Peter Pan complexity

The little children in Tom Perrotta’s novel are a bunch of 3-year-olds who play at the same suburban park. The title might as well refer to their parents, who share their tedious egotism and behave like seventh-graders on an unsupervised lunch break. But don’t we all. Perrotta has crafted a sly tale of children trapped in adult bodies, coming to terms with lives as repetitive and incomprehensible as any grade schooler’s.

Perrotta’s adults aren’t unsupervised, of course. They’re under surveillance by their tiny charges, a force more oppressive than the Stasi, empowered as it is by parental love. Perrotta captures the tyranny and the small pleasures of tending a small person: “ ‘Daddy?’ Aaron was holding his index finger in front of his nose and sniffing it with a dubious expression. ‘Somefing smells like poop.’ ” The adults’ liberating weapon, beyond the ken of their controlling toddlers, is sex. The tale revolves around an unlikely but thoroughly credible affair between squat peasant Sarah and blond Adonis Todd, dubbed “the Prom King” by the playground moms. They’re both nice people, trapped by their own inertia but warmed with a disarming honesty about themselves. Perrotta has an affection for such folks. Though he annoys us with their passivity, he also shows its roots in compassion. These people don’t want to hurt anyone.

Their romance takes place at the playground, the community pool and, when they can persuade their kids to take a nap at the same time, at Sarah’s house. Perrotta plays their affair against Madame Bovary’s. Emma Bovary is summoned through a retired schoolteachers’ book club to which Sarah and Mary Ann, her nemesis, are invited. As Mary Ann, who rules the playground and her household with military precision (sex every Tuesday at 9), puts it: “Bovary cheats on her husband with two different guys, wastes all his money, then kills herself with rat poison. Do I really need to read this?” Sarah sees it differently: “It’s not the cheating. It’s the hunger for the alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.” Uh-oh.

To detail the plot is to diminish its pleasures. Perrotta’s scenes sneak up on you. He primes you to expect the worst and then delivers something more credible and amusing, developing his characters’ emotions in potent and surprising ways. Suffice it to say that the water is muddied by a former cop’s crusade against a child molester, alternately pathetic and terrifying, who moves to town to live with his mother.

Most satire is fueled by anger. Not Perrotta’s. His is gentler stuff. This is his real debt to “Madame Bovary.” Like Gustave Flaubert, he adopts his characters’ points of view in detailing the absurdities of their lives, usually a bemused acceptance of their lot; but the frustration, the potential anger, always lurks just beneath the surface. The result is a story that builds in intensity, from the banal to the genuinely moving, as his characters confront their diminished expectations. The 3-year-olds are redeemed by their heedless beauty, the adults by their groundless optimism. *