The Abstinence Teacher illuminates the powerful emotions that run beneath the placid surface of modern American family life, and explores the complicated spiritual and sexual lives of ordinary people. It is elegantly and simply written, characterized by the distinctive mix of satire and compassion that has become Tom Perrotta's trademark.
Stonewood Heights is the perfect place to raise children: it's got good schools, solid values and a healthy real estate market. Parents in the town are involved in their children's lives, and often in other children's lives, too—coaching sports, driving carpool, focusing on enriching experiences. Ruth Ramsey is the high school human sexuality teacher whose openness is not appreciated by all her students—or their parents. Her daughter's soccer coach is Tim Mason, a former stoner and rocker whose response to hitting rock bottom was to reach out and be saved. Tim's introduction of Christianity on the playing field horrifies Ruth, while his evangelical church sees a useful target in the loose-lipped sex ed teacher. But when these two adversaries in a small-town culture war actually talk to each other, a surprising friendship begins to develop.
"Perrotta is that rare combination: a satirist with heart....Those who haven't curled up on the couch with this writer's books are missing a very great pleasure."—Seattle Times
"Tom Perrotta is a truth-telling, unshowy chronicler of modern-day America."—The New York Times Book Review (in a front-page review)
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
October 16, 2007 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781427201928
- File size: 299536 KB
- Duration: 10:24:01
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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AudioFile Magazine
With its plethora of characters--religious fanatics, a soccer team of preadolescent girls, divorced fathers desperate to connect with their children, former addicts, drunks, has-beens, and wannabes--Perotta's latest novel would present a challenge to any narrator. (And it seems no accident that his three audiobooks have three different readers.) The talented Campbell Scott, who's narrated novels by Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and others, takes the challenge in stride, modulating his voice not only for the different voices, but also for a particular character's mood shifts. Still, except for a few moments when the novel makes you sit up and take notice, it remains pedestrian overall, despite everyone's best efforts. R.R. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
July 9, 2007
Signature
Reviewed by
Jennifer Gilmore
Tom Perrotta knows his suburbia, and in The Abstinence Teacher
he carves out an even larger chunk of his distinct terrain. Set in the northeastern suburb of Stonewood Heights, Perrotta’s sixth book takes on the war between the liberals and the evangelists.
When single mother Ruth Ramsay, the sex ed teacher at the local high school, tells her class that oral sex can be enjoyable, the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth church begins its crusade. Believable or not, the school agrees to an abstinence curriculum and in marches JoAnn Marlowe with her blonde hair and pumps to instill in Ruth the tenets of the new program. Gone are the days of rolling a condom over a cucumber; now Ruth is required to promote restraint, which she does wearily and halfheartedly.
These are heady days, when students rat out their teachers and the local soccer coach—Ruth’s daughter is on his team—is a divorced ex-druggie and active Tabernacle member. When Tim leads the team in prayer, Ruth wrenches her daughter from the circle and the hostility between the opposing camps grows.
Who is bad and who is good? Ruth’s youthful promiscuity rises slowly to the surface, while Tim’s struggle to stay sober makes him constantly confront his past. He’s lost his wife and daughter—also on the soccer team—to his addictions, but now he’s clean and married to a Tabernacle girl. His Jesus-loving ways, however, are in direct conflict with his desires, rendering him the most complex and likable character. When he loses his own battle with abstinence at a poker party, the finest scene in the novel culminates with his keying “Jesus” across the hood of an SUV parked in the drive. Ruth would gladly have sex if it would only come her way, and she also drinks on school nights. A less well-drawn complement to Tim, Ruth is a tolerant liberal with a newly toned body who plays therapist to her gay friends, but who can’t accept that her children are interested in Jesus.
The lesson is that everybody must give up something. Even Ruth’s ex-lover, once a pudgy trumpet player, no longer eats to maintain his abs of steel. So what is lost when we cannot succumb to our desires? Who then do we become? The book is rife with Perrotta’s subtle and satiric humor (the Tabernacle is seen as a place of diversity, while the punks, Deadheads and headbangers of Tim’s past are all predictably the same), but these questions get lost as the plot winds down. Issues of sex and religion that have shaken the town become, in the end, the story of what Ruth and Tim’s newly forged relationship will soon become. (Oct.)
Jennifer Gilmore is the author of the novel
Golden Country, which will be out in paperback in September. -
Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from December 24, 2007
Campbell Scott's soft but edgy voice, earnest but with a sarcastic undertone, is a supremely apt fit for Perrotta's skewering of modern society. He is equally convincingly whether playing Ruth, a divorced mother and sex-education teacher whose community is becoming increasingly religious, to her transparent disgust, or Tim, Ruth's daughter's soccer coach and a born-again Christian who is dismayed to find himself slipping back to his old drug addict habits. Scott's tone shifts just slightly to distinguish between the deadpan humor of Ruth's gay friend Randall and the pious lack of humor of an “abstinence consultant” brought in to reform Ruth. The evenness of Scott's voice is a reminder of how similar everyone is on a certain basic level, and it makes for a greater impact when he does raise the volume or change his accent. Though Ruth and Tim oppose each other over religion, their love lives are both damaged, and Scott's quiet, intimate delivery brings out the wounded yet stubbornly hopeful side of both of them. This is an effective, smart and sharp production. Simultaneous release with the St. Martin's hardcover (Reviews, July 9).
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