WATERTOWN, MASS. — Some drank themselves nearly to death. Others spiraled downward on their own. Still others spent years spinning in neutral, cursing their studio overlords.
By and large, literary writers working for Hollywood have not had great luck at it. The character of Barton Fink, the pretentious playwright of the Coen brothers film who provokes a murder and a fiery inferno without producing much decent dialogue, is a comic exaggeration of a long, uneasy tradition.
Until Tom Perrotta came along, that is. Perrotta, whose novels "Election" and "Little Children" were made into acclaimed films by Alexander Payne and Todd Field, respectively, is now most of the way through adapting his new novel, "The Abstinence Teacher," for directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the couple behind last year's hit "Little Miss Sunshine."
It's a sign of the excitement over Perrotta's work that the screenplay was almost done before the novel, which looks at a small-town culture war between a liberal sex-ed teacher and a group of evangelical Christians, was published last week. If he's had trouble with the film world, at least the more literary, boutique-scaled side he's dealt with, he's keeping it to himself.
"I know what it's like to spend two years alone in my room writing a novel," Perrotta, 46, said at a bustling restaurant here, about a mile from his home and about midway between the blue-collar New Jersey of his youth and the leafy suburban world of his recent novels. "But the friction of working closely with talented people is exciting, and I've learned a lot."
Short, bespectacled, wearing cuffed jeans and the kind of jacket favored by indie-rockers in the '90s and gas station attendants in the '70s, in person he lacks the smugness he sometimes projects in photographs. Instead, he's soft-spoken, sensitive, almost self-protective.
He's been called an American Chekhov, a compassionate satirist and an heir to Cheever and Updike. To detractors, he's a lightweight who's perfect for shallow Hollywood.
More than anything, though, his work is defined not by a type of character or a setting in the suburbs but by a tone of voice: cutting and observed with a kind of oracular detachment, but with forgiveness and respect for old-fashioned decency. It's also a tone, rooted in realism, that doesn't draw attention to itself.
In a funny way, the premises and the novels themselves seem to be rendered by a different writer.
