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A Guy's Moleskine Notebook

Thoughts and reflections on works of fiction and literature. Pondering of life through pictures and words. Babbling about gay rights. Travelogues and anecdotes.

  • [1] Annie Proulx: Brokeback Mountain
  • [2] Arthur Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha
  • [3] Yu Hua: To Live
  • [4] Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty
  • [5] Colm Toibin: The Master
  • [6] Carlos Ruiz Zafon: The Shadow of the Wind
  • [7] William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience
  • [8] Charles Higham: The Civilization of Angkor
  • [9] Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case
  • [10] Dai Sijie: Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
  • [11] Alan Hollinghurst: The Swimming-Pool Library
  • [12] Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
  • [13] Colm Toibin: The Blackwater Lightship
  • [14] Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star
  • [15] Ross King: Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
  • [16] Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
  • [17] Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections
  • [18] Colm Toibin: The Story of the Night
  • [19] John Banville: Shroud
  • [20] Leo Tolstoy: Resurrection
  • [21] Peter Hessler: River Town, Two Years on the Yangtze
  • [22] Ian McEwan: The Atonement
  • [24] Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  • [25] Ignacio Padilla: Shadow without a Name
  • [26] Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
  • [27] Richard Russo: Straight Man
  • [28] Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
  • [29] Alan Hollinghurst: The Spell
  • [30] Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil
  • [31] James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room
  • [32] Ken Kesey: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • [33] Xingjian Gao: One Man's Bible
  • [34] C. Jay Cox: Latter Days
  • [35] Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird
  • [36] William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew
  • [37] Daniel A. Helminiak: What The Bible Really Says about Homosexuality
  • [38] James Baldwin: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
  • [39] Kenji Yoshino: Covering - The Hidden Assault of Civil Rights
  • [40] Italo Calvino: If, On a Winter's Night A Traveler
  • [41] Arthur Phillips: The Egyptologist
  • [42] George Orwell: 1984
  • [43] Michael Warner: The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and Ethics of Queer Life
  • [44] Andrew Sullivan: Virtually Normal
  • [45] Henry James: The Wings of the Dove
  • [46] Jose Saramago: Blindness
  • [47] Umberto Eco: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
  • [48] Dan Brown: Da Vinci Code
  • [49] Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
  • [50] Ken Follett: The Pillars of Earth
  • [51] Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
  • [52] Michael Thomas Ford: Alec Baldwin Doesn't Like Me
  • [53] Jonathan Franzen: How To Be Alone
  • [54] Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude
  • [55] Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club
  • [56] Zadie Smith: White Teeth
  • [57] Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Double
  • [58] Jose Saramago: The Double
  • [59] Andrew Holleran: Dancer from the Dance
  • [60] Heinrich von Kleist: The Marquise of O & Other Stories
  • [61] Andrew Holleran: In September, the Light Changes
  • [62] Tom Perrotta: Little Children
  • December 26, 2006

     

    [62] Little Children - Tom Perrotta

    Light reading fare for Christmas. I saw the movie with Matty a while ago and so this movie tie-in would be somewhat interesting to read. After all, it's not too bad of reading.

    Talk about dysfunctional families and their drama. Set in a quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen in a way we think well-to-do upper middle class families have any issues, (WRONG!!!) Little Children brings forth inner-workings of what becomes a roaming crisis. Sarah, mother of a three-year-old, is a relapsed feminist, an ex-gender studies graduate student aborting her PhD who studies the behavior (which she concludes monotonous and boring) of suburban women. Their stroller rut at the park, which consists of playing, snacking, and strictly adhering to the offerings' timetable (which they deem conducive to the kids' being admitted to Ivy-League schools)was pleasantly interrupted by the surprised return of Todd, a stay-home dad whose dark feature, cropped blond hair, and jock physique have captured the hearts of the moms.

    No sooner have the thirty-something parents met did they hit it off. At least they have one thing in common: Unhappy (unfulfilling?) marriages. Sarah's husband has become more and more involved with his fantasy life on the internet than with his family. His indifference toward her engenders in her a sudden and desperate desire to visit the town pool, where she knows Todd would take his so on a clammy afternoon, as the cloud looms low, promising rain but not delivering. Todd, despite his being married to a fine woman with a svelte body, brooded over his failing to pass the bar exam. His problems are more intrinsic, springing from his troubled ego, salt-and-peppered by wounded vanity. Piqued at his uncertain career, he realizes something must be wrong with his being, as if he had sleepwalked through life to realize he cannot possibly be happy with any of the choices that the world offer him.

    Maybe Todd's wife, an aspiring documentary filmmaker, has incurred on him that he must feel to live up to a vision of himself that had never really been his own. But satirically who is this novel is NOT wearing a mask, hiding behind his/her true self? While the residents of the quiet suburban town wrangle out of their wits with these emerging dramas, sexual fling, unhappiness over wrong marriages, a ex-convict of child molestation returns to the community to live with his mother. How ironic and satirical that the one person who has nothing to hide, whom everyone in town shirks and scorns, in somewhat a positive way, helps these lost folks come to their own senses about who they are.

    3 Comments:

    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    I watched the movie and never knew it was adopted from a novel until I saw the credits. Sounds like it's not a bad read huh?

    12/26/2006 5:22 PM  
    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    I just picked it up at the bookstore, along with A Very Long Engagement...all movie tie-ins...

    12/27/2006 3:51 PM  
    Blogger matty said...

    Everyone tells me that the novel is better than the film which is usually the case. I am curious to know if the novel from which LITTLE CHILDREN is based sheds more light on the damaged man who has moved back in with his mother. That was a part of the film that felt unfinished or incomplete to me.

    12/28/2006 9:43 AM  

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