by JULIET WATERS

Tom Perrotta has been called the American Nick Hornby, and in a lot of ways the comparison's a good one. Though he received raves for his last book, Joe College, he's probably best known for Election, the book that became a massively underrated movie. Like Hornby, Perrotta's seemingly inexhaustible subject is postponed adolescence. But as Perrotta points out with an epigraph from Flaubert's Madame Bovary, it's hardly a subject unique to our times: "‘I have a lover! I have a lover!' she kept repeating to herself, revelling in the thought as though she were beginning a second puberty."

There are, however, significant differences between Perrotta and Hornby. Perrotta has a much darker sense of humour. He doesn't tend to let his characters off the hook with poignant, but ultimately happy conclusions. Perrotta's heroes are more likely to end up smarter than happier. His latest novel, Little Children, is no exception. What makes it exceptional is the switch he's made from hero to heroine. Though Sarah's perspective is only one of among eight different characters, it's her vision of the world that opens and closes the book, and there's no question that she's the novel's central character, and its Madame Bovary.

Little Children starts off in a pretty unlikely place to set a novel about sexual awakening: a playground. Sarah, a grad-school-educated every-feminist whose only true love so far was another woman, has drifted by process of default into the life of a suburban mother. She hated teaching and she hated working at Starbucks. Marrying a kind-hearted, authoritative, middle-aged man she met while frothing latté seemed like a good escape at the time. Enter Todd, the JFK Jr. of stay-at-home dads. Gorgeous, charming, but as unfocused as Sarah, he can't seem to pass his bar exam, which is fine because he actually likes staying home with his three-year-old son.

All the other suburban moms are too paralyzed with lust to even talk to him. When Sarah, a chronic plain Jane and hopelessly inept mother, ends up starting a badly disguised affair with Todd, it is, needless to say, not met with friendly encouragement. Fortunately for Todd and Sarah, their fellow suburbanites are too distracted by the news that a convicted sex offender has moved into the neighbourhood to focus their moral outrage on the couple.

Add this to the fact that Sarah's husband, Richard, has developed an extremely unhealthy obsession with Slutty Kay, a woman he's met on the Internet, and you've got the makings of a pretty transgressive summer in the suburbs. Where the plot takes its most unexpected turn is when it starts to seem like Sarah and Todd are actually quite deeply in love. Or are they? Again and again, Perrotta brings the story back to that murky moral area where the life one's expected to lead conflicts with the life one longs to lead and the possibility that there is actually such a thing as the life one's meant to lead.

For a novelist so associated with the angst of contemporary men, Perrotta is taking a pretty big risk in writing this novel not only from the perspective of a woman, but of a mother. Fortunately, Sarah's frustrations, humiliations and failures are so accurately portrayed here it's, frankly, kind of eerie. Perrotta even pushes the envelope one step further. Sarah is not merely a woman who feels like a bad mother, she is a bad mother, or least she is until circumstances conspire to jolt her into reality. Perrotta never strains to make her likeable. Often she isn't. But for all her flaws, she never becomes an object of contempt.

Little Children is a deft, satisfying social satire. It nudges Perrotta out of the category of talented-but-lightweight writers, into a league of quietly remarkable writers more comparable to Flaubert than Hornby.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta,
St. Martin's Press, pb, 368pp, $34.95