The NY Times talks to Perotta about evangelicals and sex:

“The Abstinence Teacher” kicks off when Ruth Ramsey, a sex-education teacher and divorced mother of two young daughters, makes an offhand remark to her students about oral sex that draws the ire of local evangelical church members. Seeking to placate them, the school board invites a “virginity consultant” to supervise Ruth in class. The rest of the novel revolves around the budding relationship between Ruth and Tim Mason, a newly remarried soccer coach and recovering drug addict who has recently found God and wants to share him. ...

Mr. Perrotta said the idea for the novel emerged from the 2004 presidential election, when evangelical voters were widely credited with swinging the result for George W. Bush.

“I was surrounded by people who kept saying, ‘Who are these people?’” recalled Mr. Perrotta, who has lived in Belmont, Mass., for the past eight years with his wife and two children. “I did feel somewhat inadequate as a novelist, just like I’d missed something huge happening in the country. I really did set out to kind of investigate that world.”

Raised Roman Catholic (he has since lapsed), he was exposed to the self-abnegating form of religion that the evangelicals, he said, had turned on its head, particularly in regard to sex. “Catholic theology is that sex should be for procreation,” he said. “But this evangelical culture really embraces orgasms and pleasure. I was really interested in that strain of Christianity that didn’t want to fight American culture and that’s a vibrant, prosperous and actually kind of sexy culture.”

After the abstinence rally in Wayne, Jason Burtt, the national director of Silver Ring Thing, the organization that mounted the event, approached Mr. Perrotta in the lobby and started chatting with him about the novel. When Mr. Perrotta explained the plot, Mr. Burtt said he didn’t believe in coercing teachers. “It is so unconvincing when someone in school is forced to teach abstinence if they don’t believe it,” Mr. Burtt said.

As he prepared to drive back to his mother’s house, Mr. Perrotta said he was struck by how courteous and nonconfrontational Mr. Burtt had been. Over all, he said, evangelical Christian culture seems mostly polite, as well as extremely un-ironic.

Link to the thread on the film.

Coincidentally, I had already linked to a National Post profile of Perrotta earlier today (or, since it's after midnight now, yesterday). But it's nowhere near as informative as this New York Times piece.

The publicity blitz continues with a lengthy [url=http://www.powells.com/interviews/tomperrotta.html?utm_source=powellsbooks.news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pbnews_20071016_B&utm_content=TOM%20PERROTTA%20]interview[url] with Powells.com. It's quite informative, not only about the new novel, but about the novel and film of Little Children. However, when I read questions like this from interviewer Chris Bolton, I wonder if I should bother continuing:

Bolton: In the very beginning of the novel, I was absolutely on Ruth's side. She was my favorite character, I instantly connected with her — whereas Tim, I was a little distant from and a little suspicious of. Somewhere around the midsection, my loyalties flipped. I wasn't suspicious of Ruth, but suddenly Tim's story started to really compel me. I wonder how much of that was because he was born again instead of being, say, a lifelong evangelical.

I think I get the distinction Bolton's after, but IMHO, he mangled his terms. It's a charley horse between the ears for me.

The New York Times reviews it:

Mr. Perrotta’s efforts to make “Teacher” open out into some sort of commentary on contemporary society’s culture wars are decidedly the weakest part of this novel. His descriptions of the Tabernacle and its sanctimonious leader, Pastor Dennis, who is constantly monitoring his flock’s private lives, are predictable, even clichéd, and it’s often hard for the reader to believe that Tim, a dedicated Dead-head and hard-partying rock ’n’ roll dude with one marriage behind him, would suddenly allow himself to be “saved” by the church, give up all his wayward ways and marry a pretty but robotic member of the congregation simply because this is what Pastor Dennis thinks he should do....

The exchanges between Tim and Ruth about religion and its place in school tend to devolve into fairly standard-issue debates about church and state, faith and agnosticism — Ruth says things like, “Just because something’s written down in a book that’s a couple of thousand years old, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right.”

But Mr. Perrotta, happily, keeps such passages to a minimum, focusing instead on Tim and Ruth’s daily lives in suburbia: a place defined by soccer games and trips to strip malls and middle-aged malaise, a place that Mr. Perrotta, with this novel and “Little Children,” is increasingly mapping as his own.

I'm on disc 2 of the audiobook, read by Campbell Scott. I love it, but it's still early. I was going to link to a dismissive audio review that I thought was on NPR, but I can't find it now. Must've been somewhere else on the Web.

However, here's one more interview with the author. It's quite good, and the interviewer mixes things up in the comments as well, which are mostly thoughtful.

I'm pretty sure the review I heard on NPR Books was dismissive. Maybe I'm imagining things.

I searched on the author's name at NPR.org and got an audio feature, but not a review.

Duh! I just found the review.

Here's what I wrote over at Goodreads:

Perceptive, funny, and painful -- a great picture of Evangelical life from a professed outsider. (I should know, being an Evangelical myself.) NPR dismissed this book in a short review; I can't figure out the hostility. It's insightful and appropriately shaded.

--I appear to be in the minority. Lots of mildly disappointed readers of The Abstinence Teacher over there.

I'm no Perotta expert, but this was well worth a read. In fact, I can't think of a better literary look at Evangelicalism and its struggles. What am I missing? It won't change my life, but I think it does a service to Christians by portraying their struggles honestly -- more honestly than the Christian fiction I've read.

Perotta mentions his research for this book in a new Slate article, "The Sexy Puritan". Warning: The article includes a vivid, ummm, "mission" statement of a group called "Christian Nymphos." Never heard of it.

Ha! Back in Bible school, we always used to say we were looking for a "Christian nympho" to marry.

One of the newspapers I write for, BC Christian News, used to be called Christian Info, and, um, certain people had fun with that name.