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“It was standard-issue Abstinence Ed, in other words–shameless fear-mongering, backed up by half-truths and bogus examples and inflammatory rhetoric–nothing Ruth hadn’t been exposed to before, but this time, for some reason, it felt different. The way JoAnn presented this stuff, it came across as lived experience, and for a little while there–until she snapped out of her trance and saw with dismay how easily she’d been manipulated–even Ruth had fallen under her spell, wondering how she’d ever been so weak as to let herself be duped into thinking it might be pleasant or even necessary to allow herself to be touched or loved by another human being. Why would you, if all it was going to do was make you vulnerable to all those afflictions, all that regret?”

In this excerpt from Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, Ruth, who has been the Sex Ed teacher at Stonewood High for years, is sitting in on a presentation by JoAnn, who represents the New Deal. After inadvertantly telling her class that “some people enjoy it” when asked a question about oral sex, Ruth has reached an unexpected and uncomfortable level of infamy in her small town, as has Sex Ed.

Although it begins with Ruth’s newfound notoriety, The Abstinence Teacher, like most of Perrotta’s work, quickly becomes about the broader theme of social misfits and skewed relationships. In Election, the story centered around the school, in Little Children, the playgrounds of suburbia, and in The Abstinence Teacher, the discomfort centers broadly around the topic of religious fundamentalism, still tucked safely in the suburbs. This one just didn’t work for me. I found it dull and pedestrian, with very little new to say on any of the subjects it seemed to attempt. And those subjects–fundamentalists, prayer at soccer games, sex ed in schools, recovering drug addicts, middle-aged divorcees trying to date–stop me if any of that sounds new or interesting to begin with! Not only that, but it lacked the humor and wit that Perrotta has made his trademark in the past.

My advice, abstain from The Abstinence Teacher, and rent Election this weekend…