Light and funny, with an easy conversational style, Tom Perrotta's novels make excellent summer reading.
His characters probably resemble and behave like people you know in real life — except behind closed doors, where they're inclined to dabble in activities more adventuresome, even slightly taboo. Then again, for all you know, your real-life acquaintances do the same.
Perrotta's previous novel, 2011's "The Leftovers," was an exception to his customary ordinariness. It's about the weird ways people respond when 2 percent of the Earth's population abruptly vanishes. This may be the book for which he's best known, thanks to a well-received HBO series of the same title, which Perrotta co-created and co-wrote.
But in "Mrs. Fletcher," he's back to following regular people doing mostly regular things in a regular middle-class suburb.
Eve Fletcher is a 46-year-old divorcee who manages a senior center. Her only son, Brendan, just left for college. Both struggle to adjust to their new identities — empty nester, student — with mixed success.
Sex, inevitably, enters the picture. Eve develops a habit of watching internet porn. She makes an abrupt (and rejected) advance on one person. She gets involved with another in a relationship so inappropriate and unlikely it tests the reader's credulity.
Brendan, meanwhile, finds his crude "bro" behavior more unwelcome at school than he'd expected. Callow and insensitive, Brendan is hard to like. But after he destroys a promising new relationship through a boneheaded move, readers may feel a twinge of sympathy. He doesn't just lose the appealing potential girlfriend — he receives additional punishment so harsh it's hard not to see it as an overreaction to Brendan's sexist but not lastingly damaging blunder.
Brendan is desperately apologetic and basically well-meaning. Given today's campus battles with actual sexual assault, this episode carries political implications I'm not sure Perrotta intended.
