Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta, 2013
The magic trick:
Manipulating characters and timelines so that the story features moments of maximum drama (even if it’s not totally realistic)
We begin another week of love stories to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
“Nine Inches” falls into the category of sour love stories. It’s a sad one, full of mistakes and regret. I have a strange love-hate relationship with Tom Perrotta’s style. I find that his sense of humor, which is certainly prominent in this story, is based on an assumption that the reader will sympathize with the white suburbanite dad who has been beaten into a numb kind of underachievement by his banal white suburbanite dad life. And though it’s not ever explicitly stated, women, if not to blame for this banal life, are somehow exempt for feeling its effects quite as much. It’s as if they’re suited for this banal white suburbanite world, while men were made to do greater things.
I don’t respect that point of view, but isn’t it odd how I seem to not necessarily reject it as I read Perrotta. I maybe even enjoy it? What does this say about me at my core? I’m not sure. Maybe, being a white suburbanite dad, I quietly revel in the point of view. Not proud of that, but I’m just being honest. Anyway…
It helps, too, that Perrotta of course is a terrific writer. He knows a plot needs big stakes and high-drama moments – even (or especially) in the small suburban worlds he writes about. He knows humor keeps things moving too. These are addictively readable stories.
Here, in “Nine Inches,” we have a protagonist who almost began a relationship with a fellow teacher a few years ago. It didn’t happen, and he went on to marry a different woman with whom he now lives with a young child and another baby on the way. The protagonist comes into close contact with the fellow teacher/could’ve been while the two are chaperoning a middle school dance.
OK, so that’s our premise.
But what’s interesting here is that the night they spend together at the dance here in this story presents itself as basically like the first time they’ve seen each other or talked since the end of their almost-relationship.
That’s ridiculous.
Two or three years have passed.
They have worked together at the same middle school the entire time.
There would be so many times that awkward conversations or rehashing would come up in the teachers’ lounge, at a school volleyball game, at the annual school awards assembly, the spring graduation, another dance, lunchtime, etc. etc. etc.
It’s just a realistic scenario – if the reader takes even just a minute to think about it.
However, I’m not sure that matters.
As I said, Perrotta knows how to give his stories zip, and one of the main ways he does that is to manipulate his timelines and characters so that the story we read features moments of maximum drama.
A couple of teachers reckoning with old feelings and regret over what could’ve been for the first time in three years? That’s interesting!
And that’s quite a trick on Perrotta’s part.
The selection:
As far as he knew, the other chaperones on duty were Rudy Battista and Sam Spillman, so he wasn’t sure what to make of it when he spied Charlotte Murray checking her reflection in the glass of a vending machine outside the cafeteria. She turned at the sound of his footsteps, looking unusually pleased to see him. Her expression changed as he got closer, her mouth stretching into a comical grimace of despair.
“Help,” she cried, flinging her arms around his neck as if he were a long-lost relative. “I’m trapped at an eighth grade dance!”
Charlotte was an art teacher, a bit of a bohemian, one of the more interesting women on the faculty. Ethan patted her cautiously on the upper arm, struck by how pretty her reddish-gold hair looked against the green of her sweater. There was a nice clean smell coming off her, a humid aura of shampoo and something faintly lemony.
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