Mrs. Fletcher

“The truth is, I would’ve been just as happy to spend another year at Haddington High, where I knew everyone and everyone knew me […] I had a slightly queasy feeling walking into town—the same feeling I got in airports and train stations—like there were way too many people in the world, and none of them gave a shit about me.”

Brendan, who was popular and well-adjusted in high-school, struggles to cope with the anonymity of entering a new social environment. Given that Brendan “would’ve been just as happy” to have a repeat of his high school years, the reader can ascertain that he is not ready to adapt to a new, more challenging environment. 

“U r my MILF! Send me a naked pic!! I want to cum on those big floppy tits!!!” 

This is the anonymous text message that disgusts Eve and also begins to arouse her curiosity about pornography. It also resembles the message that George verbally repeats while they are having sex and brings up the possibility that he is the original sender. 

“I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth, which was that I wanted to party as much as possible and do the bare minimum of studying.” 

Brendan’s meeting with his academic advisor, Devin Torborg, shows how unprepared he is for college and adult responsibilities. He struggles to arrive with a legitimate answer for why he is at college; the real reason for his attendance is that he wishes to prolong a frivolous high-school-like experience. 

“This girl was really pretty. I hadn’t noticed at first, because I was so distracted by her shoulders.” 

When Brendan meets Amber, he almost does not notice her beauty; her wide shoulders do not fit his stereotype of female attractiveness. Ironically, it will be this non-stereotyped beauty that will most obsess him.  

“MILF. She knew what the acronym stood for […] In her mind, it was just an updated name for the old Mrs. Robinson stereotype, the predatory middle-aged woman with a taste for younger men, maybe even boys who were Brendan’s age.” 

At this early stage in the novel, when Eve is getting used to the fact that someone thinks that she is a MILF, it is almost impossible for her to imagine that she would act on her privilege. Ironically, she believes that it would be impossible for her to act like Mrs. Robinson. 

“The couple on her screen would seem inspired, or even blessed—you could see how alive and happy and unself-conscious they were—and maybe you envied them a little, but you also wanted to thank them for sharing this moment with you, and then that last barrier would crumble, and maybe for a minute or two you’d feel that you were right there with them, like when you heard a good song on the radio and the next thing you knew you were singing along.” 

This passage reveals the process of Eve’s pornography addiction. She transforms from an admiring and slightly envious spectator of an unknown couple, to feeling like she is part of their activity. Perrotta uses the simile of singing along to a good song to show how innocuous Eve believes her pornography habit is. 

“It was only Thursday afternoon, but Amanda Olney could already feel the weekend coming on like an illness—a mild case of the flu or some mid-level gastrointestinal distress, the kind of ailment that didn’t leave you bedridden but kept you confined to the couch, unfit for human interaction. You just had to wait it out […] a forty-eight-hour quarantine until Monday rolled around and you could head back to work.” 

Amanda’s feelings about the weekend exhibit the kind of loneliness and social anxiety that many of the novel’s characters experience. The simile of a mildly debilitating flu describes the kind of unease brought on by leisure hours void of meaningful human interaction. 

“There I was, people-watching and eating my omelette, and the next thing I knew my throat swelled up. And then my eyes started to water. I realized I was two seconds away from bursting into tears like a little bitch, right there in the Higg.” 

Brendan is overwhelmed by feelings of isolation in the college cafeteria and feels as though he will start crying. Likening himself to “a little bitch,” Brendan shows how he thinks of tears as feminine, and beneath him. 

“By the time we graduated, I’d pretty much erased him from my memory, which was why it was such an unpleasant shock to hear my mother mention his name that afternoon, dropping it so casually into the conversation, asking if it rang a bell.” 

Brendan deals with his guilt by repressing the memory about how he and his friends treated Julian. However, when he is miserable at college and his mother mentions Julian’s name, he feels that his past has come back to haunt him. He might believe that his past mistreatment of Julian is responsible for his present sadness. 

“It has to be me, she thought. She was older. She was the boss. But she didn’t feel confident at all. She felt lost and scared, like she was floating in space, completely untethered.” 

Eve has absorbed the pornographic prescription that the older woman should always be the initiator in lesbian romance. However, the role does not fit with her inner insecurity at embarking on a new chapter in her sexual life, and she feels ungrounded and unlike herself.  

“I kept thinking how unfair it was that my father loved him so much and held him so tight—way tighter than he’d ever held me—and wouldn’t let go no matter want.” 

It is difficult for Brendan to admit, even to himself, how jealous he is of the love, time, and attention his autistic half-brother, Jon-Jon, receives from their father. It is especially painful to see how Ted clings onto Jon-Jon, when he has already shown many times how he can let Brendan go. 

“Doesn’t matter where you live. You’re always just kind of alone with your shit, you know?” 

Margo, Eve’s transgender professor, contemplates moving to a big city, where her transition will be more accepted; however, she has the wisdom to recognize that her problems will accompany her wherever she goes. This phenomenon applies to Brendan as well, who carries his immaturity and feelings of paternal abandonment to college; however, his loneliness makes them more apparent. 

“I think I watched too much Sex and the City, and read too many novels about amazing female friendships. These women who talk about everything, and help each other through the hard times. I never had friends like that when I was living as a guy.” 

Margo confesses how lonely and unsupported she felt when she was a man. She and Eve discuss how the male experience is generally one that lacks emotionally-supportive friendships. However, Margo, as an outsider looking in to the friendships of cisgendered women, has an idealistic view of how open and trusting these are. 

“She always fell for athletes […] almost all of them hard-drinking white guys with buff, hairless chests, marinated in privilege, unable to see beyond their own dicks. And of course they yes her like a disposable object, without regret or apology, because that’s what privilege is—the license to treat other people shit while still getting to believe that you’re a good person.” 

Amber’s lament about falling for the same kind of white, privileged jock guy, repeatedly, reveals important observations on privilege: Because the world has allowed them to do so, men like Brendan behave selfishly and carelessly, while still retaining the veneer of goodness. While Amber believes that such men always get away with their misdeeds, Brendan’s college experience proves otherwise. 

“She stood there in her black-and-white panties, hugging herself and shaking her head no, like there was no point in discussing anything with me, like I wasn’t worth the effort.” 

Amber does not give Brendan a chance to explain why he treated her so degradingly during their sexual encounter. Brendan is therefore flooded with the hopeless feeling that his mistake is irredeemable, which is a new experience for someone as privileged as him. 

“Tranny and MILF. MILF and Tranny. They were just labels, a shorthand to organize the chaos of the world. But the labels have a funny way of becoming our names, whether we agree with them or not.” 

Eve contemplates the logic and the unfairness of labeling. She considers that the world is too vast and multifarious for people to not resort to labels, when they describe things. However, the labels become problematic because of the hurt and objectification suffered by those who are being labeled.    

“Julian was worried. November always felt like a setback, what with the clock change and the sudden onset of darkness, the bitter wind and that ominous sense of falling behind. It reminded him too much of last year, the paralyzing sadness that had set in with the cold weather, day after day when he saw no reason to get out of bed […] He didn’t think it was going to happen again, not with these new meds, but you never knew. That was the scary part. You never knew.” 

This passage reveals the very real trauma that Julian has experienced since Brendan and his friends locked him in a Port-A-John that summer evening. A year on from his depression, the cold weather triggers him into a feeling of hopelessness and disconnection with his peers. He now must take medication and worry about the possibility that his medication will fail, and that he will experience another downwards spiral. 

“I couldn’t stop staring at my face on the wall. It looked so real up there, just as real as the one I saw in the mirror every day. Even worse, I was grinning like an idiot, as if I were thrilled to be included in the art show and had no objection to the words beneath the painting, a brief summary of my entire life: HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT.” 

Brendan is still in shock at his public humiliation in Amber’s friend Cat’s art show. For the first time in his life, he feels that he has lost control of how other people see and talk about him. Despite flaws in Cat’s artistic technique, Brendan identifies the face as “real” as the one he sees in the mirror, as he accepts that it is really him who has disappointed Amber.  

“This was Brendan Fletcher’s mattress and Brendan Fletcher’ pillow, the soft place where Brendan Fletcher rested his empty head and dreamed his vapid dreams. Julian wasn’t sure whether to feel disgusted or triumphant. It had to count as a small victory just to be here, to have penetrated so deeply into enemy territory.” 

Julian, who is assigned Brendan’s room when the Gender and Society participants get drunk at Eve’s house, is both disturbed and victorious in the context of this predicament. By some strange twist of events, he gets to access the privilege of formerly popular Brendan and inhabit the spaces where sleeping Brendan was at his most vulnerable. By extension, he develops the fantasy of inhabiting Eve’s body, as Brendan did when he was a fetus. 

“Unfortunately, they weren’t good pretenders. They couldn’t remember how to talk to each other like normal human beings, or find a way to build a fence around their error. In the end, it was easier not to have to see each other at all.” 

Eve and Amanda deal with the awkwardness of working together, after their sexual adventure and the quenching of their affair. Unpracticed at how to negotiate transgressions between sexual and professional arenas, they lapse into avoiding one another. Although they are two liberal-minded women, their feelings are arguably a symptom of the conservative wider culture. 

“It had seemed like a minor sacrifice at the time—a brief hiatus from her continuing education—but it turned out to be a much bigger loss than she’d anticipated. Without a class to get her out of the house—to focus her thinking and provide her with a community of like-minded people—her intellectual life ran out of steam, and her social life went into a coma.” 

Eve could not have anticipated that she would have experienced the self-inflicted end to her education as such a loss of vitality. She finds that merely working and being Brendan’s mother does not provide her with the social and intellectual stimulation she craves, and the coma-like state she has dropped into is one of depression and indifference. 

“The back streets of Haddington were desolate at that hour, uninhabited except for a lone coyote prowling on Lorimer Road. It was scrawny and dejected-looking, all ribs and tail. The animal stared forlornly at Eve as she passed, as if it would have appreciated a ride across town.” 

While Eve is torn about whether or not she should sleep with Julian and decides to leave him a Tupperware of food, she spots a coyote, who in his scrawny dejection, resembles lean, depressed Julian. Indeed, Eve feels a maternal attraction to the animal, projecting onto it the desire of needing a ride across town. 

“The first picture was too dark, so she turned on her bedside lamp and tried again. This one was much better. Her hair was wet and her eyes were tired, but she looked like herself, which was a fairly rare occurrence.” 

Eve feels most like herself in the intimate bathroom mirror selfie that she sends to Julian. The partially dressed, yet not fully naked, picture is the coyly permissive sexual identity Eve is most comfortable with. Ironically, Eve’s method of sending an intimate picture is one she has adopted from Julian’s generation, rather than her own. This picture resolution is also a compromise, which allows Eve to not cross the boundary of having sex with a boy her son’s age, but equally, does not leave Julian empty-handed and rejected.