Named for the skill with which its adult characters handle their inhibitions, Little Children presents the full cultural and emotional underpinnings of this suburb-shaking event ...will be Mr. Perrotta's breakthrough popular hit, but its undercurrents are more somber ...Mr. Perrotta is too generous a writer to trivialize that. What distinguishes Little Children from run-of-the-mill suburban satire is its knowing blend of slyness and compassion ... In the end Mr. Perrotta presents Little Children as a moment in amber rather than a sudsy melodrama.
In this darkly comic novel, Tom Perrotta reverses Tolstoy's famous dictum and suggests that all unhappy families are unhappy in the same way ...the unnamed Eastern suburb in which Little Children is set appears idyllic, a place where young couples go to work, run errands and raise kids as they plan happy, affluent futures in tidy first homes. But this bourgeois Eden is haunted by two serpents –– one external, one internal ... Subtler but more insidious is a weary dissatisfaction with their partners that frays the fabric of the young married couples' lives as moths waste a garment ... Perrotta's suburban comedy of mannerisms provides lively reading as long as he remains focused on Sarah, Todd and their prematurely frumpy milieu ... A more mature writer might have pulled it off, but Perrotta doesn't, and Little Children feels like two stories imperfectly grafted together, one darkly comic, the other merely dark.
...in Tom Perrotta's black comedy Little Children, Mom and Dad — when they're having sex at all — are doing so with the spontaneity of an alarm clock ... As perceptive social satire, Little Children offers a generous serving of laugh-out-loud moments. But Perrotta deftly keeps the reader off-balance with the troubling goings-on at Blueberry Court... At the same time, he locates the humanity in even the most repugnant characters. A palpable undercurrent of sadness lies just beneath the surface in Little Children; Perrotta knows the white-picket-fence dream is just that. Life is disappointing, sure, but a little bit of breezily sardonic humor goes a long way to ease the pain.
That's the world inhabited by the characters in Tom Perrotta's new novel about fear and parenting in suburbia ...Perrotta's interest lies in those moments when an otherwise uneventful life seemingly drained of all potential for surprises takes an unexpected turn and suddenly the characters are in uncharted shadowy territory ... Much like Chekhov's gun, a convicted pedophile introduced early in a novel must 'go off' by book's end. It is a testament to Perrotta's skill as a writer and his compassion for his characters that what follows is never obvious ... With this novel, Perrotta has entered the land of Updike and Cheever, the messy world of adults who cheat on spouses and fail their children, but, unlike those excellent authors who staked out the territory, Perrotta's excursion does not leave an aftertaste of bitterness that is so much a part of those writers' work.
So what a wicked joy it is to welcome to town Little Children, Tom Perrotta's extraordinary novel about adultery and child-raising in a generic American suburb that seems to be somewhere outside Boston. It represents a sterling comic contribution to the growing literature of the Bad Mommy and the Bad Daddy ... So the novel begins, and right away the amused tenderness of Perrotta's satire should be evident. His judgments about his characters are acerbic and yet somehow land upon them as lightly as a blanket on a baby ... Families, in the view of Perrotta's men and women, are misbegotten alliances, hothouses of boredom, nurseries of disappointment ... Little Children raises the question of how a writer can be so entertainingly vicious and yet so full of fellow feeling. Bracingly tender moments stud Perrotta's satire.
Little Children is Perrotta's first attempt at an adult novel, an ensemble piece about two unfortunate suburban couples and their dysfunctional neighbors ... This might sound like John Cheever run amok, except that Perrotta is a satirist. He cuts loose here with some hilarious observations and set pieces that expose human foibles at their funniest ... So, all told, Perrotta is once again writing about adolescents, except with children ...manages to satirize and sympathize at the same time, redeeming all his characters by digging deep for their shared humanity, which shines through in a surprisingly serious final scene.
In Little Children's Massachusetts suburb of Bellington, the residents all make children priority number one, although not always in the same fashion ...Tom Perrotta directs his attention to the hidden rhythms of suburbia, with its daytime rituals of playground lunches, trips to the pool, and low-key affairs, and nighttime escapes into midnight football leagues, book groups, and Internet porn ...retains his gift for humor, but the laughs keep curdling as his characters' actions draw them ever closer to disaster. Whether they're motivated by selfishness or unhappiness, or whether it matters, they couldn't be more doomed if Thomas Hardy had written them ...the supporting cast is straight out of a central-casting conception of suburban dystopia.
Several unstable marriages and a convicted pedophile’s presence in a quiet suburban community ignite a complex, fast-moving plot ... Savvy dialogue and interior monologue, characters so real you know you have relatives and neighbors exactly like them, and Perrotta’s unerring grasp of the cultures of marriage and young parenthood pull the reader smoothly through a flexible narrative filled with little shocks of surprise and stunning set pieces... An accomplished comic novelist extends his range brilliantly. Perrotta’s best.
The characters in this intelligent, absorbing tale of suburban angst are constrained and defined by their relationship to children ... 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 ...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 ...exploring the roiling psychological depths beneath the placid surface of suburbia.
