City Desk: Behind the Façades

Perrotta’s characters are all telling themselves stories, about themselves. Todd, once upon a time a college football star, tries to relive his ball-playing wonder years by joining a midnight-football league, imagining himself back to the time years before he became little Aaron’s mother. Sarah, before she meets Todd, imagines herself to be an anthropologist: “I’m a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself’“

There’s no harm in those daydreams. But later she’ll imagine herself as an Emma Bovary, one whose “heroism” puts her in a superior league of adulteresses. “Madame Bovary’s problem wasn’t that she committed adultery,” she explains. “It was that she committed adultery with losers. She never found a partner worthy of her heroic passion.” Sarah entertains the fantasy that, in Todd, she has found such a partner.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Perrotta’s characters are all telling themselves stories, about themselves. Todd, once upon a time a college football star, tries to relive his ball-playing wonder years by joining a midnight-football league, imagining himself back to the time years before he became little Aaron’s mother. Sarah, before she meets Todd, imagines herself to be an anthropologist: “I’m a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself’“

There’s no harm in those daydreams. But later she’ll imagine herself as an Emma Bovary, one whose “heroism” puts her in a superior league of adulteresses. “Madame Bovary’s problem wasn’t that she committed adultery,” she explains. “It was that she committed adultery with losers. She never found a partner worthy of her heroic passion.” Sarah entertains the fantasy that, in Todd, she has found such a partner.