Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta (Scribner 2022)

Jack Weede

My hands were tied. There was no way that a sixtysomething male administrator could broach the topic of your erect nipples with a thirtysomething female teacher and not expose himself to a humiliating lawsuit, along with a virtual stoning on the internet. I had no intention of jeopardizing my hard-earned reputation—not to mention my retirement benefits—in the final lap of my long career.

I know I can sound paranoid about this stuff, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating. The pendulum has swung so far in the past few years, I’m amazed I haven’t been run out of town on a rail, like so many of my contemporaries. Guys like me are the old guard; we’re presumed guilty whether we’ve done anything wrong or not, though many of us have sinned, I’m not denying it. It’s like the French Revolution. They had a just cause, but they got a little overzealous with the guillotine. That’s where we are now with all this Me Too business. The-old-guy’s-head-in-a-basket phase.

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta (St Martin's Griffin 2007)

For as long as he could remember, Tim had been drawn to this feeling of community; it was something he'd sought, at very different points in his life, from both punk rock and the Grateful Dead, and in each case, for a little while, he'd found what he was looking for. But it hadn't lasted, and in any case, the communities in which he claimed membership were disappointingly narrow and homogenous compared to this one. The punks and the Deadheads were overwhelmingly white, suburban, and young; almost everyone wore similar clothes and hairstyles, and had had more or less the same experience of the world. Not like here, where you saw grandmothers and little kids, people in wheelchairs, whole families, interracial couples, immigrants who barely spoke a word of English, college teachers, twelve steppers, cancer patients who'd lost their hair, lonely people who didn't have a friend in the world until they stepped through the door of the Tabernacle.