The empty nest
From “The Leftovers” to “Little Children,” Tom Perrotta has shown himself to be your go-to guy to take the crazy pulse of America and make a wise and witty diagnosis. His beleaguered characters fight the confines of their culture, and make disastrous errors in judgment. But they do so with such humanity and insight that you can’t help feeling for them. Perrotta’s latest novel, the sublimely funny “Mrs. Fletcher,” is no different. About love, sex, disability, able-bodiedness and gender, it also skewers how we navigate parenthood, morality, letting go and moving on.
Eve Fletcher is at a crossroads. She’s in her mid-40s and believes that surely life should be better than what’s been dished out to her. She’s the top executive at the Haddington Senior Center, surrounded by the faces of old age, which repeatedly remind her of what’s next down the road. She’s also newly divorced from Ted, who married a younger woman he met on the Casual Encounters section of Craiglist, and who’s now grappling with an autistic son. She adores her own jock son, Brendan, but he’s gone off to college, and empty nesting isn’t exactly her cup of cappuccino. Desperate to find something to be engaged in, she finds herself addicted to online pornography, especially featuring women, which both disturbs and excites her.
Meanwhile, Brendan is finding that his clueless bro behavior doesn’t play as well in college as it did in high school. Zack, his roommate and
best friend, begins to detach from him because he can’t stomach the way Brendan objectifies women (the women aren’t so wild about it, either), and he can’t even begin to keep up with his classes. Like his mom, he feels that the world is skidding away from him, and he isn’t sure what to do about it.
Perrotta always casts a wide character net, and we’re soon introduced to Margo Fairchild, a transgender professor Eve befriends, and Amanda, a young co-worker that Eve finds herself dangerously attracted to. But Amanda has her own issues. An outsider both at the senior center and in her own age group, Amanda’s drawn to older guys — and maybe to Eve. As Eve juggles her feelings for Amanda, she also tries to better her life, taking a Gender and Society class at the local community college, where another important character comes into play: Julian, one of the other young students, who, unbeknownst to Eve, was viciously bullied by Brendan in high school. Making matters even more of a mess, Julian has a crush on Eve and pursues her with passion.
All of Perrotta’s characters are fumbling with what they’ve been taught about sex and morality, which seems in opposition to what they are so powerfully feeling. Perrotta is astute about complex social problems, including how well a mother and grown son can understand one another, what it means to be transgender and lonely, what our sexual mores really mean, and how anyone different — whether autistic or sexually fluid — can find a comfortable place in a confusing world. We are all in flux, on our way to becoming other people, pressured to fit in, something Eve sees.
“I can see who you were, one self on top of the other,” Eve thinks about Margo — but she can appreciate both of them. Brendan, too, changes. His best-friend roommate now only has time for his girlfriend, who is in a wheelchair. And as Brendan gets more and involved with his autistic stepbrother, he comes to realize that people have more dimensions than he thought possible, and that everything is not necessarily what it seems, and that leads to change.
Perrotta’s language is astute and fun, filled with references to popular culture — bongs, YouTube, tattoos. Eve isn’t sure she is supposed to fit in with modern technology, because “she was a little too old to have that kind of relationship with her phone.”
Perrotta makes you care deeply for every character, and all of them make mistakes, some of them heinous, but because we understand these people so well, we forgive them and hope for the best. Brendan is sexist? Well, at least he realizes it’s a flaw. And he’s trying to be different. Ted left Eve unceremoniously? But he’s a wonderful father to his autistic son. The book is drenched with yearning for connection, for a salve for our loneliness, and there are no judgments, just compassion.
How do we change the world? Amber, Brendan’s maybe-girlfriend, says we do it “one person at a time,” by opening ourselves up to possibilities, to other ways of being. And, here, in this shimmeringly satisfying novel, Perrotta uses the sense of loneliness like a propeller, raising these characters into glorious flight if they can just let themselves trust that they have wings.