Domestic bliss weathers a shock

These well-kept homes are settings of regretted compromises, gnawing aggravations, and smoldering resentments. They've all come to regard marriage as the loss of "omnipresent possibility." Everyone everywhere, it seems, has fallen almost accidentally into the same trough of quiet desperation, saddled with annoying children, unsatisfying mates, and burdensome homes. It's all wickedly funny, until it's just wicked.

Fliers around the neighborhood suddenly announce, "There is a pervert among us!" Ronnie James McGorvey is a convicted sex offender who's moved into his mother's house after serving three years for exposing himself to a child. Naturally, the neighbors are alarmed about his presence. "There seemed to be a general sentiment among the crowd that you weren't doing your duty as a citizen and a parent if you didn't stand up to express your strenuous disapproval of sex offenders." A town meeting convenes, a retired policeman wraps his whole life around the goal of tormenting McGorvey, and the playground mothers fret about the arrival of this element of depravity amid their domestic innocence.

Perrotta demonstrates no sympathy for McGorvey, but he's willing to examine him beyond the tabloid clichés and to look at the painful position of a sex offender's mother. (She keeps encouraging him to start dating again.)

What's more troubling, though, is the acidic implication that McGorvey simply suffers from a more extreme case of the monstrous selfishness that infects everyone in this town. They're all driven by perverse desires they finally conclude they can't control. McGorvey is just unlucky to have been dealt illegal urges. Sarah cheats on her spouse; Mary Anne is an organizational Nazi who strangles her family's joy; another father is addicted to Internet porn (elaborately described). "We want what we want," one of the parents sighs, "and there's not much we can do about it." Consummating her affair with Todd while reading "Madame Bovary," Sarah thinks, "They didn't really have a choice."

This thread of moral fatalism may be more disturbing than any of the other really disturbing things in this novel. The precision of Perrotta's assault on domestic hypocrisy is frightening, to be sure. And if good satire can generate a corrective jolt, this may be a deadly shock. There's a kind of authorial brutality at work here as these people are atomized into their native urges, turning on each other and forgetting, in the end, the little children.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the book section toRon Charles.

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