Porn Infiltrates Suburbia in <em>Mrs. Fletcher</em>

Tom Perrotta’s 2017 novel, , is ostensibly about porn, but it’s really about disappointment. Its characters are lonely, frustrated, dispirited fragments of suburban flotsam who keep bobbing up against one another, hoping to connect. Eve Fletcher, the of the book’s title, is a 46-year-old divorcée whose son, in the opening chapters, leaves for college, abandoning Eve to solitary evenings of Facebook and . Brendan, Eve’s son, is an amiable-ish lunk whose easy popularity in high school fails to prepare him for the byzantine politics of a campus. The book never describes Brendan watching porn, but his sex life is unmistakably contoured by its crude dialogue and misogyny. Eve, after an accidental introduction to porn, is the one whose existence is upended by it—less by its eroticism than by its promise. It offers, she thinks,