The shadow cast by college

Tom Perrotta’s fourth novel, Little Children, is a book one should read for its last 50 pages, but that means having to read the 300 before to make sense of it. In a book that primarily takes place in a suburban playground, it ends, naturally enough, at the playground, although at a worrisomely late hour, when half the book’s protagonists converge, one by one, as if it were a Midsummer Night’s dream.

For some of them it is: a heady, steamy dream of a life elsewhere, with different partners; and part of Perrotta’s irony is that rather than the garden or the wood his idyll is in the endless American suburb. Here it’s given the name of Bellington, Massachusetts, with enough markers to suggest that the city it edges towards is Boston; but this is not what one would call a geographically specific region, more a region of moral topography.