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The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
By Matt Margolis | December 6, 2007
I decided to read The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta after attending a reading and signing of Nick Hornby’s. During the Q&A he mentioned this book as one he’d recently read and had good things to say about it — so I gave it a chance. I could tell from reading some short reviews of the book before I started it that it had an agenda, but I gave it a shot anyways. The story itself reads like an after-school special, and is hellbent on portraying abstinence education as grossly misleading. The book’s portrayal of evangelical/born-again Christians is equally unflattering and misleading. The author, Tom Perrotta, seems to want readers of his book to believe that evangelicals are all weak hypocrites and fanatics with a unified mission on par with the Crusades to covert all nonbelievers at any cost while at the same time using their faith as a crutch to cover up their unhappiness.
It was amusing to read the part when Ruth Ramsay, the sex-ed teacher who begrudgingly teachers the abstinence-only sex education curriculum (which has been forced upon the school as a result of the threat of legal action) expresses her disgust over the false or misleading statistics she’s been told to give to her students, and proceeds to advise them to visit the website of Planned Parenthood for more “accurate” information — as if Planned Parenthood doesn’t have it’s own agenda that is harmful for young people.
The story went back and forth between the lives of the main characters, and the various burdens of life that define them. Ruth Ramsey being the sex education teacher who is responsible for the first controversy which starts the story. Then there’s Tim Mason, a born-again Christian who belongs the church which is the story’s antagonist. He is also the soccer coach for the team his and Ruth’s daughters play on. He is responsible for the second controversy which moves the story, when he leads the soccer team in a prayer following a hard-fought victory. Both had issues with their kids and their formers spouses, which certainly added a lot of depth to their characters.
The novel’s ending left open a lot of loose ends, but wasn’t as effective as the endings to Hornby’s novels. Hornby’s novels don’t have Hollywood-esque ending that artificially tie all the loose ends together. While the ending of Hornby’s A Long Way Down really sparked my curiosity about where the characters would continue to go. I didn’t have that same curiousity when I reached the ending of The Abstinence Teacher.
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