Now an HBO series starring Kathryn Hahn! “Light, zingy, and laugh-out-loud funny” (People), the New York Times bestselling novel about sex, love, and identity as seen through the eyes of a middle-aged woman and her college freshman son. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve Fletcher is struggling to adjust to her empty nest. One night she receives … struggling to adjust to her empty nest. One night she receives a text from an anonymous number that says, “U R my MILF!” Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life–serving as Executive Director of the local senior center and taking a community college course on Gender and Society–Eve can’t curtail her own interest in a porn website that features the erotic exploits of ordinary, middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve’s online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence.
Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve’s son Brendan–a jock and aspiring frat boy–discovers that his new campus isn’t nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night.
“The sweetest and most charming novel about pornography addiction and the harrowing issues of sexual consent that you will probably ever read” (The New York Times Book Review), Mrs. Fletcher is a timeless examination of sexuality, identity, parenthood, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they’re no longer sure of who they are or where they belong. “Tom Perrotta’s latest might just be his best” (NPR).
more
I am so glad I found Tom Perrotta. I read THE LEFTOVERS, but that is for another review–loved it! His latest MRS FLETCHER, is a little nugget of a surprise. She sends her son off to college, and there she is. Alone. She gets a steamy text–from whom? And she’s off and running in her slightly porn-o dream world. And this is a completely straight single mom who is far from Debbie Doing Dallas. Perrotta’s touch with the female psyche, which at times seems like a stretch, is whimsical and funny if not really all that believable. Still, the book is a wonderfully written, fun ride. With a happy surprise ending. Well, I had an idea, but it was still a surprise how it happened and with whom. Read it and smile.
This novel unfolds over a year of time for Eve, the titular Mrs. Fletcher, and the many people that orbit her life. In no particular order of importance, there is: Brendan her douchebag, college-aged son, Amanda her adventurous yet lonely coworker, Margo her transgender professor, and so on. The relationships and friendships span out farther to Brendan’s girlfriends and friends, Eve’s friends in her ‘Gender and Society’ class (which Margo teaches), and the complex orbital dance is revealed the farther along the novel is narrated by these various characters, all told in close third-person except for Brendan, who narrates weirdly enough in first-person.
Where the novel excels is the voyeuristic way the various narratives reveal that, even when they all get to know each other or reveal what they already know about their friends and families, they really don’t know them as well as they think they do. For instance, Eve doesn’t know just how misogynistic her son really is or the depths of his narcissism. Her idea of him is as outdated as his love for Teenage Ninja Turtles. But in the same way that people-watching fascinates some people, the unfiltered view into these characters lives–sometimes sexy, sometimes intimately confessional–is enthralling at times.
But the novel’s strength is also its weakness, being too concerned about their internal lives and less concerned about serving the overall story or plot, or lack thereof. A unified plot is nonexistent and none of the characters experience any transgressions or difficulties to overcome worth cheering for. If you’re hoping for high-risk stakes or difficult dilemmas to transcend, then you will be sorely disappointed. Ultimately, it’s their first-world problems that you will be ruminating. In fact, the ‘big reveal’ Eve explains in the final chapter that is supposed to illuminate the relevance of a sext message at the beginning of the novel–the one where an unknown sender calls her a MILF–is so groan-inducing that it’s not worth even revealing here in this review. It’s like a rom-com movie joke worthy of being left on the editing room floor.
Perrotta excels when the characters examine their hopes and dreams and debate the methods in which they want to escape the ways their lives have been compartmentalized, to the detriment of their hearts and souls. The dialogue and conversations are very realistic and utterly fascinating. If you enjoy living within the lives of others (and I admit, I do when reading fiction), then you will enjoy this novel. I did enjoy listening to these characters tell me about their lives. If you are hoping for a fascinating story with an intricate plot, then look somewhere else. I wished for more–story-wise–and was left wanting more from this novel.
I would give this novel 3 1/2 stars, if possible.
In ‘Mrs. Fletcher’ we meet Eve who is just becoming an empty-nester. On the morning of her son’s departure for college, she overhears something that becomes almost the bellwether for what we’re about to learn about almost all the characters we later meet–that though we live in a society where sex seems to be more easily accessible than it ever has been, true intimacy is as elusive as ever.
Through the eyes of Eve, her emotionally immature son Brendan, Eve’s employee, Amanda and various and sundry other people in Eve’s life, we see people yearning to be understood for who they are, and often–wrongheadedly–reaching for a sexual salve for emotional wounds. Eve watches internet porn, Amanda hooks up with guys on Tinder, and Brendan flounders through the social scene at college, not quite understanding why being a handsome though not particularly deep jock isn’t working for him like it did in high school. All of these characters have this in common; they are living in a state of befuddlement about just how hard it is to connect with people when it is so darn easy to sleep with them, or at least get a very intimate window into their most private (if not their most authentic) lives.
‘Mrs. Fletcher’ was at times funny, poignant, and even panic-inducing. It makes you wonder whether–through technology and the complex new terminology of our times–even though we can see almost anything we want to see on the internet, and have language to affirm almost everyone, we’ve missed the boat on truly connecting as human beings. Eve, incidentally, works in a senior center, which I think was no casual choice by the author. The residents are relics of another time, and even though they are at times pitied by some of the other characters in the book, they’re also not struggling with the big, unanswerable existential questions that are making the younger characters so desperately unhappy.
This book was smart, incisive and enjoyable to read, as are all Tom Perrotta’s books for me. He does ask big, existential questions, prompting us to ask them of ourselves. But always, it comes through the eyes and experiences of regular people who you will recognize and relate to right away, if not on a surface level, certainly at their core. Recommended.
In keeping with tradition, I selected a Tom Perrotta novel for my vacation read. I find it hard to put down his books, mainly due to the tongue-in-cheek style of writing that I can’t get enough of. There’s nothing better than reading about deeply flawed characters, rooting for some, not so much for others, waiting for the comeuppance or peak of the arc. Mrs. Fletcher gave me all the ups and downs, kept me up way past my bedtime, and helped me learn a valuable lesson in the end. Highly recommended.
Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher examines social and sexual cultures as they apply to suburban families. In this case both Mrs. Fletcher and her son, Brendan, are on opposite extremes of the family structure, her a MILF by her own definition, and him as a stunted, outdated sexual anomaly. Both, expectedly, will run into eye-opening, shocking events that seem to transform their lives. Yet it is the path to that enlightenment that gives the book its strength as it offers countless life-learning experiences. Don’t miss out on this particular adventure.
That moment when you thought you were reading something entertaining and amusing and then suddenly you realize it’s actually profound. This writed is so skilled at developing characters we like despite their flaws, or because of our flaws, and he always makes me miss the East. Easy read, but not fluff. Real characters with real problems, who handle them, ultimately, with grace.
½
Mrs. Fletcher is a satire of sorts about issues such as loneliness, reinvention, coming of age, privilege, gender, labels, resilience, porn, and sexual identity. The characters aren’t especially likable nor do I believe they are meant to be – they’re just there, being used in a book meant to showcase themes the author wants his readers to think about. To my knowledge, there’s no persuasion or agenda here…just a few fairly disjointed story lines not so gently brought to the surface for your consideration. This was my first time reading a book written by Tom Perrotta and his style and subject choices interest me a great deal. I’ll be checking out more by this author.
My favorite quote:
“Girls wear pink, boys wear blue. Boys are tough. Girls are sweet. Women are caregivers with soft bodies. Men are leaders with hard muscles. Girls get looked at. Guys do the looking. Hairy armpits. Pretty fingernails. This one can but that one can’t. The Gender Commandments were endless, once you started thinking about them, and they were enforced 24/7 by a highly motivated volunteer army of parents, neighbors, teachers, coaches, other kids, and total strangers – basically, the whole human race.”