Little Children

By Tom Perrotta
St. Martin’s Press, 2004
355 pp., $24.95

    Tom Perrotta is one of our keenest satirists.
    In “Little Children,” Perrotta takes on the suburban angst of the 30-somethings, couples who are just beginning to appreciate that daily life can be (and often is) just a series of small defeats and even smaller victories.
    There’s Sarah, the once-upon-a-time feminist who’s lost her way in the transition from Starbucks barista to wife and mother, married to the much older Richard, a branding consultant who’s developed a crush on an Internet porn star. There’s Todd, the handsome househusband, an ex-jock the mothers at the playground have tagged the “Prom King” who’s happier helping his 3-year-old son crash his trains or watching skateboarders pop wheelies outside the public library than studying for the bar exam (again). Mary Ann turns her life into an exercise in time management, scheduling sex with her husband (every Tuesday night at 9) and is trying to fast-track her 4-year-old into Harvard.
    The moms fight the culture wars with one another over “Madame Bovary” in the book clubs. The dads join vigilante football teams that recruit by profession (the Auditors, the Cops, etc.) rather than aptitude. Affairs begin and end over juice boxes and goldfish, marriages and careers fall apart and come together again with a crazy-quilt logic, and by the time Perrotta has finished, it’s clear that not all of the “Little Children” of the title are in the sandbox.

Interpreter of Maladies

By Jhumpa Lahiri
Houghton Mifflin, 1999
198 pp., $12

    “Interpreter of Maladies” is really something. With this, her first published book, Jhumpa Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, the Debut of the Year award from the New Yorker and the PEN/Hemingway Award. The nine stories in this collection are filled with arresting images and unfold subtly, almost in real time.
    In the title story, Mr. Kapasi spends an afternoon in Konarak, India, serving as a tour guide for Mr. and Mrs. Das, a U.S.-born Indian-American couple who have come to visit Mr. Das’ retired parents. Mr. Kapasi drives them all to temples and other local points of interest. But he is a tour guide only as a sideline; Mrs. Das is fascinated to learn that during the week, he works for a doctor, interpreting the language of the local Gujarati-speaking patients to the Hindi-speaking doctor, interpreting their maladies.
    He considers himself a failure, having dreamed in his youth of being a scholar, interpreter and diplomat on the international stage. In the course of the afternoon, while her husband and children are away from the car, Mrs. Das confides her deepest secret to Mr. Kapasi, hoping he can interpret, and somehow cure, her malady. She takes some pictures, and then asks him for his address, so she can send him copies. Mr. Kapasi feels she is drawn to him as a person; he begins to imagine a future exchange of letters between the two of them, and to fancy a deep connection with her. But, alas for him, Mrs. Das’ motive is very different.
    Every story in this collection is striking and absorbing. Jhumpa Lahiri has also published a novel, “The Namesake.”
—Susan Hardie

Hissy Fit

By Mary Kay Andrews
HarperCollins, 2004
419 pp., $24.95    
    Keeley Rae Murdock is ticked. One the eve of her dream wedding (at the rehearsal dinner no less) she catches her fiancé A.J. in flagrante delicto with her maid-of-honor. Furniture is thrown (underwear, too); faces are slapped; and language is used that shocks the good people of the Madison, Ga., country club. Her daddy loses his membership. And her ex-fiancé’s wealthy family tries to destroy her interior design business out of spite. But when handsome and fabulously wealthy Will Mahoney commissions her to decorate his dream home, Keeley finds that she doesn’t have much time to sit around and pine.
    “Hissy Fit” is a thick book that tries to cover too much territory. However, the characters are interesting, and overall the story works. Readers will be so entertained that they will forgive the ending, which is predictable and slightly unsatisfying.
—Earlita Chenault