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Ruth Ramsey, single mother of two young girls, is the sex education teacher at the local high school of Stonewood Heights. She believes that “Pleasure is Good, Shame is Bad, and Knowledge is Power,” so when asked by her class, she admits that when it comes to oral sex, “some people enjoy it.” An honest but poor choice of words, Ruth just “saw it as her mission to demystify sex for the teenagers of Stonewood Heights … She was doing what any good teacher did- leading her students into the light, opening them up to new ways of thinking, giving them the vital information they needed to live their lives in the most rewarding way possible.” However, the evangelicals disagree and she quickly finds herself in a battle against the Tabernacle Church.
In an ironic reversal of roles, Ruth is forced to be the new abstinence teacher and Tim Mason, her daughter’s ex-drug and alcohol addicted, newly-reformed born-again Christian soccer coach, finds himself in equal trouble when he leads the team in prayer after a game. Never failing to embarrass her children, Ruth forcibly drags a daughter from the field in a verbal outrage against the church’s proselytizing. It was now that “she understood that she’d been fooling herself. This wasn’t just professional; it was personal. They’d already messed with her job, and now they were coming for her kids.”
While Ruth’s buried youthful promiscuity teases its way to the surface, Tim’s internal struggle with his future forces him to admit he never left his past, or wanted to. He starts thinking the church “had been a great crutch, helping him to finally break his dependence on alcohol and drugs. But maybe that’s all it was. Maybe now that he’d gotten himself clean, he could ditch Jesus and go back to his old ways.”
Tim doesn’t approve of Ruth’s teaching methods and Ruth doesn’t approve of Tim making The Tabernacle’s mission public. Despite their instinctive mistrust of each other, they find debating the issue surprisingly enjoyable. Soon they have no choice but to take the other at something more than face value.
The Abstinence Teacher strips us of our cloak of political correctness. Its exposes our spirituality, sexuality, sexualization of spirituality and spiritualization of sexuality in ways most of us are not comfortable discussing or even acknowledging. Perotta also keeps a very even balance of liberal vs. evangelical. He points out rights and wrongs for each, and stays fairly neutral.
The novel’s distinct personality delivers both cynical sarcasm and compassion well, though only in internal dialogue. Externally, the characters are flat and stereotypical. Creativity and insight are Perrotta’s strengths in this novel, but he lacks those talents in dialogue and believability.
Even more disappointing is his plot. The novel is twice as long as it needs to be, with no action and even less of an ending. The slow pace screams for a plot twist to justify its length but one never arrives. Perrotta abruptly stops the novel, as if he just decided that half a book was good enough. The whole novel has a middle school short story feel. It had a lot of potential to be controversial and riveting, but just fell flat.
However, his irony is brilliant. Tim finds loving his new nice Christian young wife too much of a chore, so instead imagines her as his crude and sexy ex-wife; Ruth’s sexuality starves for male attention, but doesn’t want it when it appears; Ruth’s daughters can’t wait to go to church and Tim can’t get his anywhere near; and the only successful couple truly in love is homosexual and can’t marry.
Perrotta is also good at raising questions and pinpointing societal unease. In Ruth, he has her fear for the well being of not only her children, but for all her students: “It’s the kids who are being cheated … you got a small group of fanatics telling everybody else what they can and can’t do, what they should and shouldn’t read or talk about. Where’s it gonna end?”
One wonders the same thing.
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