Book Around the Corner

Mrs Fletcher by Tom Perrotta (2017) French title: Mrs Fletcher ou les tribulations d’une MILF.

Mrs Fletcher by Tom Perrotta is a light novel about Eve and Brendan, a mother and her son at a crossroad in their lives. Eve is a forty-six-year-old divorcée whose only son is now going to college. We see her as Brendan moves out to his dorm and she comes back home with too much free time. And Brendan is now free to party as much as he wants.

Eve is the director of her town’s senior center. She has a successful career but discovers that she doesn’t have much of a social life. She decides to enroll at her community college and follow a night class, Gender and Society. There, she meets new people and is confronted to the question of gender and identity in the 21^st century as their transgendered teacher tells them about her life journey.

At the same time Eve jump-starts her social life thanks to the new acquaintances she makes in college, her sex life is revived. She gets hit on in class and one night, she receives a text from a stranger: “U r my MILF”. Startled, she googles MILF and stumbles upon the amateur porn site milfateria.com. She starts clicking and coming back to it, again and again…

And, oh yeah, she’d also gone and gotten herself addicted to internet porn, not that that was anything to brag about. She understood that it was a little extreme, or maybe just premature, to call her problem an addiction—it had only been going on for a month or so—but what other label could you use when you did something every night, whether you wanted to or not? Tonight she knew she would go home and visit the Milfateria—it felt like a fact, not a choice—probably checking out the Lesbo MILFs, her current go-to category. Last week it was Blowjob MILFs—lots and lots of blowjobs—and the week before that had been a more eclectic period—spanking, threesomes, butt play—just to get a sense of what was out there.

Chapters alternate between Eve’s new life and Brendan’s experience in college. They take opposite directions. Brendan painfully learns that he behaves like a pig with women. He is also faced with the necessity to grow up and get out of his self-centered bubble.

Eve stops to be only a mother to reconquer the woman in her. Her discovery of pornography oddly emboldens her and fosters new fantasies. Brendan has visibility learnt sexuality and relationships to women in pornography and needs to make the journey towards respect. He needs to learn how to interact properly with girls.

Mrs Perrotta is a fun book to read and its humorous tone is deceptive. Behind Eve’s antics and Brendan’s blunders, there’s a fine description of our internet-based societies and a real look at people’s loneliness. Some tell their lives on Facebook and rub their happiness in other people’s face or, as Eve points out when she scrolls through her married friends live feed,

It had been a lot easier to be a loser back in the days before social media, when the world wasn’t quite so adept at rubbing it in your face, showing you all the fun you were missing out on in real time.

Mrs Perrotta questions the impact of pornography accessible to anyone, easy sex on Tinder and other aps. Perrotta is not judgemental, he just shows the consequences on his two characters, Eve and Brendan. It is also the turning point of the relationship between a mother and her son, now a young adult. As a parent, she also needs change from mothering a child to interacting with her adult son. It is a new time in a parent-child relationship, one that lasts until the balance shifts again and children take care of their ageing parents.

Besides Eve and Brendan, there’s a good collection of side characters in Mrs Fletcher, a group of people we are happy to follow in the novel. They are all confused in their own way and try to navigate our world as best they can.

I thought that the ending was a bit trite but, in the end, when I think about it, it’s realistic. Our real lives are not as fascinating as the ones in novels anyway.

I owe the fun reading time I spent with Mrs Perrotta to Guy whose review is here. Thanks Guy!!