The Abstinence Teacher
Tom Perrotta, St. Martin’s Press, 2007

The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta, St. Martin’s Press, 2007

The American Culture War is a phantom, an ideological divide that may or may not exist depending on whom you talk to. The right wing wants to believe in the Culture War because an active conflict and a sense of persecution is vital to its cause, a militaristic call to arms for the faithful against the insidious nonbelievers. The left wing, on the other hand, wants to dismiss the idea of the Culture War because the very idea of ideological disharmony – two distinct, irreconcilable moral and philosophical camps – runs counter to the liberal notion that we’re all the same under the skin, and without divisive leaders to incite us we’d all get along just fine. 

It is into this treacherous fray that Tom Perrotta steps with his latest novel, The Abstinence Teacher. Where Perrotta stands on the issue is not entirely clear; his central characters are not set in strict philosophical opposition, but the suburban world they inhabit is certainly fraught with cultural tension, and at times – and to certain of the characters, at least – it feels like a war zone. 

As in his previous novels Election and Little Children, Perrotta sets his story in the tree-lined streets and high school halls of suburbia. Stonewood Heights is a perfect little piece of northeastern tranquility, a small town with not much going on to disrupt the status quo. What passes for controversy in Stonewood Heights happens when Ruth Ramsey, the local high school sex ed teacher, makes a misstep in her class: she suggests to a religiously conservative student that some people enjoy sex. The fallout from the incident includes a reprimand for Ruth and the institution of a new, abstinence-based (and factually deficient) sex ed curriculum provided by a consultant who, to Ruth’s disgust, uses sex to sell virginity. 

In the meantime, a new church  known as the Tabernacle is pulling a growing number of born-again Christians through its doors. Founded by Pastor Dennis, a preacher who was called to the pulpit by a mystical experience he had while working as a salesman at Best Buy, the Tabernacle is fundamentalist, evangelical and uncompromising. The church was behind the uproar over Ruth’s teaching practices, and they are just getting started. 

The book’s central conflict unfolds when Tim, the coach of Ruth’s daughter’s soccer team, leads the team in an impromptu prayer after an emotional game. Ruth is horrified, and she struggles to find the appropriate way to react, given the increasingly hostile cultural environment of Stonewood Heights. She has her principles to worry about, but she also must consider her daughter – not to mention her inexplicable and irritating attraction to Tim. 

Perrotta actually spends more time with Tim than with Ruth. We are to see him, presumably, as the human face of the right-wing culture warrior. He is a recovering substance abuser, a former rock musician, a divorced father and a wavering adherent to the Evangelical Christian doctrine of the Tabernacle. He is imperfect and tempted; he still has lustful thoughts about his ex-wife, and on more than one occasion he stands on the verge of falling off the wagon. 

But it’s Tim’s fallibility – or, rather, his own recognition of his fallibility – that makes him an inadequate representation of the right-wing culture warrior. He is not self-righteous or intolerant – he admits that he, personally, doesn’t see anything wrong with homosexuality and doesn’t understand why other Christians make such a big deal about it – and he is all too aware of his incomplete understanding of the nature of faith and redemption. In fact, these shortcomings (as they would be called by Pastor Dennis and the Tabernacle congregation) are the only thing that makes Tim a sympathetic character. He is humble and respectful of others, traits not all that common among culture warriors, and if Perrotta had chosen to focus on a more typical character (Pastor Dennis, say, or John, Tim’s assistant coach on the soccer team) it would have been much harder to make the case that there are good hearts on both sides of the battle lines. 

Ruth is potentially a more interesting and credible character, but Perrotta doesn’t give her much to do. She gets very upset when someone tries to pray with her daughter – and presumably we are to think that’s she’s overreacting based on her professional run-ins with Evangelicals – but little else seems to motivate her beyond a profound sense of loneliness, a feeling so extreme that she can sometimes barely make herself get up off the couch. She is so lonely that she is jealous of her best friends, a troubled but essentially happy gay couple, and she can’t resist being drawn to a man whose personal and spiritual beliefs she abhors. 

Perrotta shows the divide between left and right as an immensely complicated territory, perhaps more complicated than it actually is. Tim holds views that are inconsistent with the end of the cultural spectrum that he supposedly inhabits, making a connection between him and the firmly left-leaning Ruth an artificially believable possibility. Maybe that’s what Perrotta intended: to suggest that good hearts can’t roll to the right, no matter how badly they want to. Or maybe he’s trying to say that most Americans don’t fit neatly into ideological pigeonholes (although most fit much more neatly than an improbable character like Tim). But by sidestepping the really difficult – and undeniably real – divisions between American cultural poles, Perrotta has created a novel that doesn’t offer a particularly realistic or compelling snapshot of our current national dilemma.

       Evan Gillespie is a former Fort Wayne native living in South Bend.

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