The Abstinence Teacher

Midway through Tom Perrotta's sixth novel, The Abstinence Teacher, Ruth Ramsey, a divorced mother of two, reluctantly puts on lipstick and jeans to meet with Tim Mason, her youngest daughter's soccer coach and a recently remarried father of one, and even more reluctantly admits to herself that she secretly wishes she were a heroine in one of those "corny `opposites attract` narratives" that were so appealing to writers of sitcoms and romantic comedies. The formula was simple: you brought together a man and a woman who held wildly divergent world views - an idealistic doctor, say, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer - and waited for them to realize that their witty intellectual combat was nothing more than a smoke screen, kicked up to conceal the inconvenient and increasingly obvious fact that they were desperate to hop into bed together.