There's something about Tom Perrotta and presidential elections. In 2004, it was George W Bush's down-to-the-wire victory, courtesy of the Christian fundamentalist right in Ohio, that fired him up to write The Abstinence Teacher, which has finally been published this month in the UK. Twelve years before that, the three-way fight between Bush Sr, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot inspired Election, Perrotta's novel about a three-way shoot-out for the meaningless title of high-school president. On this score, then, surely the election of Barack Obama must be something of a disappointment. After all, John McCain and Sarah Palin were every American satirist's dream ticket.
"We'll see," Perrotta says, half-smiling. "We've come to the end of easy money and there's going to be a great deal of economic and psychological pain as people adjust to the new reality. When I grew up in the 70s, there was a sense of political disillusionment, but there was still a hippy ethic where it was OK to bump around, temp a bit here and there and steer clear of the system. By the 80s all that had gone; there was no virtuous sense of living the life you wanted. If you hadn't made a fortune then you had missed the party. Well, the party is well and truly over now. And let's face it, with Bernie Madoff ripping off his friends and trophy wives divorcing their husbands now the money has evaporated, there's still plenty of comic material."
Perrotta isn't an easy writer to classify. The New York Times described him as an "American Chekhov" - "I don't know what that means," he grins, "but I like it." Others have drawn comparisons with John Cheever and John Updike. On the other hand, Esquire recently dismissed him as someone who "writes books for people who don't much like books - satires for nice people, fuck books for prudes. The problem with this approach is that it's not really satire at all. It's situational comedy." Perrotta has never claimed to be a satirist; rather, he sees himself as a comic realist putting unashamedly stock characters into extreme situations and seeing how they get on. In that sense, he is more of a Nick Hornby than a Tom Wolfe, though Perrotta's characters have greater depth; you won't find Hugh Grant starring in a movie of one of Perrotta's books.
The Abstinence Teacher is a case in point. It was the American culture wars of the religious right that sparked the book. "Here we had one of the most unpopular presidents in living memory, who had taken us into a disastrous war, getting re-elected largely because the Christian right managed to create hysteria about the non-issue of gay weddings in Ohio," Perrotta says. "I found myself angry and confused. It was embarrassing for me to have to admit as a novelist that I didn't really understand what made half of America tick."
But what makes the novel work are the characters. There's Ruth, the liberal sex education teacher who gets on the wrong side of the puritanical school governors for telling her pupils about oral sex; and there's born-again Tim, the ex-stoner, ex-rock'n'roller and football coach. Perrotta somehow manages to avoid playing them for all-out comic effect to come up with a layered story that offers no easy answers. "I had no desire to use the book to right wrongs," he says. "What I tried to do was get into the mindset of the religious underclass, rather than just observe them from the outside, and I had to let go of my preconceptions. I had originally thought that Ruth would be able somehow to undermine the system from within, but as I started writing I realised she would never be allowed to get that far. The religious right is just too powerful to let that happen."
Even so, he still came up with a psychologically convincing ending that also left you with the sense that the puritans aren't always going to get it their own way. This ability to merge the complex with the accessible has made him a natural for Hollywood. Two of his previous books, Election and Little Children, have been turned into movies, and Perrotta has been working on a screenplay for The Abstinence Teacher with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, directors of Little Miss Sunshine, for much of the last couple of years.
Working on the screenplays of his own books isn't so much about ensuring the fidelity of his vision as getting another writing gig. "A screenplay that was utterly faithful to the original would be a deadly process," he says. "There would be no energy to it. Where writing a novel is an exploratory process - one in which I never know quite what I'm doing when I start - a script is a much more technical exercise in compressed storytelling, and you have to understand what works filmically."
Screenwriting is also undeniably more lucrative - an attribute that may have greater attraction for a hard-up, working-class writer from New Jersey than it does for a more patrician class of novelist. Not that Perrotta ever intended to write screenplays; like most things in his career, it came in a roundabout way as a result of his bloody-minded determination to get published.
His first book was the still unpublished - "and likely to stay that way" - Lucky Winners, about a family that falls apart after winning the lottery, which he wrote in 1991 while teaching at Yale. The following year, he wrote Election, and failed to get that published, too. "My agent told me she had tried to get Lucky Winners published everywhere," he says, "and she said it was much too soon to go back to the same publishers with a much shorter novel. I didn't have much of a clue about the business back then, so I took her advice, even though I wasn't entirely comfortable with it." Next he started work on a collection of coming-of-age short stories, which were eventually bought by a small press called Bridge Works and published as Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies. It didn't sell that well but picked up enough decent reviews to get Perrotta noticed. He started work on The Wishbones, his first full-length novel to be published, and it was while giving a public reading of this work in progress that he got lucky with Hollywood.
"It was complete chance," he laughs. "There was a film producer in the audience who said the book sounded like a movie. I told her Wishbones wasn't ready yet, but that I had this other thing and sent her the manuscript of Election. Hollywood was obsessed with teen movies at the time. MTV were looking to do something a bit edgy and the book got optioned." Perrotta reckons it was probably down to the movie that he became identified as a satirist. "Alexander Payne's screenplay was a great deal more satirical than the book," he says, "and most people came across the movie long before the book."
Not that he's complaining. Election starred Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon, was named as best film of 1999 by the New Yorker film critic David Denby and was nominated for a Golden Globe. "It all looks like a very good career move in hindsight," he says. "The truth is, though, that Matthew Broderick was in a career lull at the time, Reese Witherspoon had never had a hit movie, and although the film was a critical success, it was box-office death. No one ever did an R-rated teen flick again."
Still, a movie is a movie, and Hollywood came knocking. "The person everyone really wanted was Alexander Payne [the director of Sideways]," Perrotta points out drily, "but he got far too busy, so eventually Warner Brothers decided it might be worth approaching the person who wrote the book. For me, it was a no-brainer really. I had this demanding non-tenure post at Harvard and I was being offered three times my teaching salary to write two TV pilots. I'm sure the Roth and Updike generation would be tearing their hair out, but it was a straightforward commercial decision. What am I going to do in the next six months? Write a couple of short stories that will earn me a few hundred dollars, or knock out a couple of screenplays that will buy me enough time to write my next novel?"
The first pilot Perrotta wrote, based on Lucky Winners, never made it into production, while the second did get made but was never developed. "It's a heartbreaking business," he admits, "but you have to write as if you believe the film will get made." But it did achieve his twin goals of getting him screenwriting experience and giving him time to write.
Joe College, a semi-autobiographical novel about a working-class boy from New Jersey who goes to Yale was published in 2000, but it was his next book, Little Children (2004), a chaotic story of failed suburban marriage, adultery, pornography and paedophiles, that established him as part of the literary mainstream. The director Todd Field didn't think twice about asking Perrotta to collaborate on the movie screenplay. The film, starring Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson, was released in 2006 and was a critical success, bringing Winslet an Oscar nomination for best actress and Perrotta and Field one for best adapted screenplay.
Despite the Hollywood success, there is something earthy about Perrotta. With his closely shorn head, a fit bruiser's physique - "it's the classic little guy's compensation" - and his hand-on-heart working-class credentials, there's more than a touch of another New Jersey native about him. "Yeah, there was a bunch of us kids who grew up with Bruce Springsteen's music," he says. "I still can't forget one gig in 1978. Bruce was still playing small New Jersey venues and we only had eight tickets between us. I agreed not to go because my girlfriend was coming back from college that weekend. The way it turned out was that Bruce played a legendary five-hour set that my friends still talk about, while I got dumped by my girlfriend."
Perrotta could almost be the physical embodiment of a Springsteen hero, who wants to both belong and not belong at the same time. He was born in 1961 in Newark, where he spent his entire childhood. His father was an Italian immigrant postal worker, his mother an Albanian-Italian - "that made her a second-class Italian" - secretary. "I don't think I ever saw my father pick up a book in his life," Perrotta says. "I certainly don't believe he ever read one of mine. He was mistrustful of education, believing more in the value of family and community solidarity. It was my mother who was ambitious for me; she had wanted to be a teacher but couldn't afford to go to college, so she encouraged us to learn."
It worked out that Perrotta fitted in everywhere and nowhere. He was the Tolkien-reading geek, who wrote "bleakly ironic, surreal short stories" ripped off from Rod Serling and Kurt Vonnegut for the school magazine. He was the star quarterback for the college football team. He was the arty-farty guy who used to listen to English prog rock, while most of the school was into Judas Priest. "I had a load of different groups of friends," he says, "none of whom really knew each other."
Or Perrotta, you imagine. Probably the only person who did properly get him was a Jewish careers teacher whose son had gone to Yale and thought Perrotta might do well there. "My family would never have given a thought to an Ivy League college; without her, it would have been the state university or nothing. It worked out well on all counts, because there were so many Yale bursaries back them, it was cheaper for me to go there than anywhere else."
At Yale he immersed himself in the western canon - Harold Bloom's influence was still very much to the fore - and he wandered around telling anyone who would listen that he was going to be a writer. Yet he never lost track of his blue-collar roots. In vacations he went to work on the garbage trucks in New Jersey - "I thought Bruce would respect me for doing it; more importantly, I thought I would respect me" - and after graduating he went back home to work the night shift in the local print shop, before he got his first writing job, hacking out copy for a consumer affairs magazine.
After decamping to California for a couple of years in the mid-80s, Perrotta headed back east in 1987 to enrol in the graduate creative writing course at Syracuse to study with Raymond Carver - another blue-collar writer. It didn't quite work out that way, as Carver disengaged from the faculty shortly before his arrival, but Perrotta was more than happy to wind up with Carver's number two, Tobias Wolff, with whom he has remained close friends. Despite this return to a more writerly academic environment, Perrotta maintained his class authenticity and was at pains to carry it through into his writing. There is nothing overly literary about his prose. "I like to write simply and clearly," he explains. "I never wanted to write for the guys I met in college; I wanted to write for the guys I grew up with who weren't literary sophisticates. I have an allergy to fancy writing. I can't imagine why anyone would want to read 1,000 pages of David Foster Wallace; the only message he would be conveying to someone like my dad was that he wasn't smart enough to understand a single word he was saying."
Perrotta also has an unfashionable belief in the importance of story - a quality that has further endeared him to Hollywood and led some critics to dismiss him as a mid-market shelf-filler. "It's not a modest aim to tell a good story," he argues. "It's incredibly difficult to do. Look how many of Philip Roth's books seem to run out of steam; it's as if he's more interested in starting the story than working out how to finish it. And as for those who go in for verbal pyrotechnics ... I often feel they do it to disguise the lack of story."
Much of Perrotta's work so far has been loosely drawn from his own experience but he feels that particular seam is exhausted. "I don't want to become one of those writers that develop a bottomless fascination with their own myth," he says. "Nor do I see myself writing one great masterpiece. What I'd really love is to be like Graham Greene, and get to 75 and see a whole shelf full of consistently good books, all remarkably similar in length." So what now? "I'm two chapters into a new novel; it's a sort of futuristic alternative history, but I don't want to talk about it because I'm actually a bit baffled by it." So will he give up on it? "God no. I don't have that many good ideas that I can afford to abandon any. There's always a point in a novel when I'm baffled, but I'll grind away at it. It will work out eventually."
"She brought along a book called Hot Christian Sex: The Godly Way to Spice Up Your Marriage ...
The book turned out to be surprisingly racy. The authors, the Rev Mark D Finster and his wife, Barbara G Finster, proclaimed the good news right in the Introduction: 'For a Christian married couple, sex is nothing less than a form of worship, a celebration of your love for one another and a glorification of the Heavenly Father who brought you together. So of course God wants you to have better sex! And he wants you to have more of it than ever before, in positions you probably didn't even know existed, with stronger orgasms than you believed were possible!'
Tim was particularly intrigued by Chapter Five, 'Is This Okay?' in which the Finsters gave an itemized list of just about every conceivable sexual act - including a few that were unfamiliar to him - along with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, depending upon whether the practice in question was expressly forbidden by Scripture."
Sometimes when you write a novel, you learn things you wouldn't have known otherwise. For example, I began The Abstinence Teacher thinking of the Christian right as the enemy of sexual pleasure, a monolithic puritanical force intent on reversing the gains of the sexual revolution. But while evangelical Christians are bitterly opposed to homosexuality and premarital sex (and comprehensive sex education, of course), they put a suprisingly strong emphasis on sexual pleasure within marriage. I had fun exploring this unexpected corner of contemporary evangelical culture, and creating my own Christian sex manual within the novel.