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Fiction

In ‘Mrs. Fletcher,’ Tom Perrotta Satirizes the Sex Lives of Mothers and Sons

Credit...Loren Capelli

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MRS. FLETCHER
By Tom Perrotta
309 pp. Scribner. $26.

You can’t be a little bit pregnant, as the saying goes, but you can be a little bit ironic. There are countless points along the axis of irony, a continuum of violence ranging from nudge to cudgel. In the sullen teenager’s blunt force sarcasm — “Great idea, Dad” — the tone obliterates and reverses the expressed sentiment. This is a kind of virulent and parasitic irony, which feasts on its host statement for effect. Far down the axis is Jane Austen’s famous opening to “Pride and Prejudice”: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Here the tone and proclamation live symbiotically. Austen is pointedly teasing the received wisdom of people like Mrs. Bennet, but her milder irony doesn’t choke the truth out of the declaration about rich bachelors. Irony can preserve as well as destroy. In fact, the plot of Austen’s novel serves to qualify, rather than undermine, its grand initial claim.

In nine works of fiction over the past 20 years or so, Tom Perrotta has made his living being a little bit ironic. Perrotta is often called a satirist, but he’s no Juvenalian slasher. He would just as soon uphold as tear down. His characters tend to be drawn from the archetypes of suburbia, but he regards them with a gentle respect and affection. They walk and talk in the service of the novels’ thematic preoccupations but they are not the victims of derision or authorial assault. Like a fencer, Perrotta aims to probe his target, not draw blood.

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Tom PerrottaCredit...Ben King/HBO

“Mrs. Fletcher,” Perrotta’s seventh novel and first since 2011’s “The Leftovers,” operates and succeeds in ways that will be pleasingly familiar to his admirers. It uses a fecund premise, a large cast of recognizable characters, a rotating point of view, a propulsive plot, a humane vision and clean, non-ostentatious (if occasionally uninspired) prose to explore a fraught cultural topic. There be dragons, yes, but decency mitigates the danger. “Mrs. Fletcher” is the sweetest and most charming novel about pornography addiction and the harrowing issues of sexual consent that you will probably ever read.

In the perfectly conceived and executed opening chapter, Eve Fletcher, a divorced mother and the harried director of a senior center, drops off her hungover son, Brendan, at a state university in the Northeast, but not before eavesdropping with disgust as Brendan, speaking in the demeaning patois of porn, receives a sexual parting gift from his ex-girlfriend. Brendan, a thoroughgoing lacrosse bro, is stoked to meet his roommate — a kindred spirit, at least initially — and to seek out postsecondary babes and Jager. The dropoff is unceremonious and disappointing for Eve, but she is effortfully optimistic to begin anew. The chapter shows us that both Eve and Brendan are suddenly free — or, to put it another way, they are suddenly vulnerable. Independence, the book suggests, is wonderful until you get it.

The novel alternates between Eve’s troubles and Brendan’s, with occasional forays into the points of view of appealing subsidiary characters. For reasons that are not entirely evident, Brendan’s sections are narrated in first person, while sections involving Eve and other characters are in close third. The latter is a more subtle and flexible tool for Perrotta’s irony — in Brendan’s chapters, readers have unmediated access to thoughts like “That night I got epically” drunk, or “I was juiced about getting laid.” But the guy who does not recognize the humanity of women is also prone to bouts of bewildered crying in the dining hall. The novel portrays Brendan as a privileged lout, certainly, but a lout who is sad, lost and wounded by his parents’ divorce and his father’s new family. He tanks classes and loses friends, and his disastrous college experience includes sexual transgression and public shaming. That Brendan’s mistreatment of a young woman he seems to like does not emerge from any specific malice, or indeed from any thought at all, is very much the point. Perrotta is an epidemiologist, not a personal physician.

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Meanwhile, back in the empty nest, Eve strives to reimagine herself and her life. At the local community college she takes a class called “Gender and Society,” in which she flushes with the eros of intellectual exertion and forms bonds with her transgender professor and a motley group of students, all gamely navigating a new era of gender and society. Also, one night she receives a naughty and anonymous text, which turns out to be a secret portal to an X-rated Narnia. Eve begins a deep but discriminating dive into niche online pornography, and her newly awakened erotic imagination eventually spills perilously into her life. Her ill-advised but carefully reasoned flirtations with Amanda, a tattooed subordinate at work, and Julian, a teenage skateboarding classmate, gradually and teasingly escalate. The culmination, which occurs pretty much simultaneously with Brendan’s campus calamity, is a boozy late-night episode that approaches, but does not cross into, bedroom farce. It does however cross into robust physical activity for which the French have a name.

Perrotta steers through this miry slough with skill, sensitivity and good-natured confidence. He is particularly adept at portraying Eve’s self-justifications — why shouldn’t she be sexually adventurous? Why shouldn’t she pursue pleasure? What is to stop her, or anyone of consenting age, from stepping at any moment into a parallel world of erotic gratification? A male writer’s depiction of a woman’s obsession with pornography risks prurience, but Perrotta consistently keeps his eyes up here — on Eve’s mind — and he does not reduce her to her sexuality. And while the allegorical shoe certainly fits (her name is Eve and she enjoys forbidden fruits), Perrotta’s tender attention keeps her round and real. In one lovely paragraph she tries a new hairstyle, “framing her face in a series of artful layers.” Here, as in his last novel, Perrotta offers a thoughtful depiction of a 46-year-old woman.

Despite her constant rumination, or perhaps because of it, Eve makes what the contemporary parent might call “bad choices.” Like Brendan’s, Eve’s indiscretions arise not from deep character flaws — recklessness, lust, self-sabotage — but rather, Perrotta suggests, from a contradictory cultural logic of sexuality, according to which fantasies and desires should be indulged, and also they should definitely not be indulged. Brendan does not examine his sexual impulses, while Eve relentlessly examines hers, but it makes no difference — both son and mother find themselves in need of a good lawyer.

Perrotta, however, is not interested in pressing charges. Eve and Brendan avoid the devastating consequences (and familiar headlines) that the novel clearly conjures. Lessons are learned — perhaps college is not for everyone, and neither for that matter is polyamory — but, as in classic comedy, order is restored at novel’s end, and here it is restored in the most classic of ways. This is no biblical fall, nor does it hew closely to “The Graduate,” to which the title seemingly alludes. Rather, it is as if Eve and Brendan (and readers as well) are given a glimpse of something both titillating and terrifying, as if we all awake, at the end, from the madness and tumult of a mid-semester night’s dream.

Chris Bachelder’s latest novel, “The Throwback Special,” was a finalist for the National Book Award.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: All About Eve. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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