Mrs. Fletcher – Tom Perrotta
Mrs. Fletcher is the second Tom Perrotta novel I’ve read after watching the adaptation on HBO. This duo coming of age story revolves around Eve Fletcher, a divorcée undergoing a mid-life crisis, and her son Brendan, a college freshman having trouble adjusting to not being the popular athlete he was in high school. She experiences a sexual reawakening that was missing from her earlier life, while he runs afoul of sexual norms while trying to navigate college life.
I can’t say the Mrs. Fletcher was a bad novel, but I can say I would have enjoyed it much more had I either read it before watching the series or if I had waited longer after the series concluded. The series was a pretty faithful adaptation, which led to not much in the way of surprises when going through the novel. The one big difference was the ending, where the series ended a chapter or two prior to the end of the book, which did provide more of a closure and wasn’t as abrupt. The other big difference, at least to me, was in the presentation of Brendan. In the series, he came off much douchier than he does in the book, with naivete replacing what came off as outright malice on the screen.
Between this and The Leftovers, I’m interested in looking into more of Perrotta’s work. I should probably do so before HBO gets ahold of it, to try and get a pure reading on my feelings about his work.
