Out & About

Ruth is the high school health teacher forced to adapt an abstinence-based curriculum. Tim is a recovering alcohol and drug user trying to hold on to the sobriety he found when he started attending a local evangelical church. The book throws these two characters together at a point of adversity and then examines how their interactions affect their lives.

This book was readable enough, with the well developed characters I am used to from Tom Perrotta. However, I felt that the point at which the book ended was the ideal starting point for the story. All that came before it seemed like a very long set up without a payout.

There’s a certain genre of movies I refer to as the “white men in suits” movies. They are the kind of movies where many of the main characters look alike and not much is done to differentiate them. I’m always slightly confused during these films, because the characters are so interchangeable. So in the third reel when it is revealed that Mr. So-and-so was really a double agent/mafia don/retired baseball player I always think, “Wait, who was Mr. So-and-so?”

This book was much like that. The story of a long time Midwestern Senator had a lot of characters who were sparingly introduced and then referred to later not only by either their first or last names, but also a nickname now and then. “Who is this person?” I kept thinking as I read.

But I kept reading and aside from having little idea who was talking 60% of the time, I enjoyed this book. Charlie, the main character was wonderful to follow through his trials and tribulations. He really wanted to do the right thing, which was difficult in the changing political landscape of the early 90s. His father was a fun character who would wander in and out and I enjoyed a few of the staffers too.

I enjoy politics (though not so much these past years) and it was fun to have a fictional window to a Senate campaign. There were story threads that could have been more developed and story threads that wandered on forever, but overall this was a pretty okay book.

Alice turns 10 at the beginning of this book. She leans out the window at her birthday party and as she leans, we are introduced to her five older brothers, her professor father and the house keeper Elizabeth who came to work when Alice’s mother died one month after her birth. We also meet other sundry characters including Theo, the grandchild of Alice’s neighbors Helen and O’Brien, who is staying with them for the summer. Theo and Alice become friends and together they befriend Kenneth, an older neighbor.

The book is best when describing Alice’s feelings and emotions. There are so many great examples of being 10 years old. I especially loved the friendship that developed between Theo and Alice and this was another book I didn’t want to finish. The closer I got to the ending, the more I set it down.

On an unrelated side note, the author’s picture fascinated me. It may have been because her hair was pinned up, but her steely expression to me seemed to be straight out of a frontier photograph from the 1850s. And I mean that as a compliment.