After I finished Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson I admit I was not quite sure what to make of it. Early on I enjoyed the humor. Midway the book dragged and the ending was predictable. But our book club found a lot to discuss and overall enjoyed this book.
The characters are quirky and damaged and although readers get to know quite a bit about them they never really felt 'real' to me and the idea of a community of parents and babies gathered for a ten-year study on childraising was bizarre.
The main character Izzy has pluck and has forged a way to survive in the midst of neglect and tragedy. Izzy's mentally ill mother's death caused her father to withdraw into an alcoholic depression. She finds a mentor in an older man at the BBQ joint who teachers her how to roast and pull apart whole hogs.
Izzy is bright but uninterested in education. Her mother had pressured for a college track in compensation for her own derailed career. Instead, Izzy pressures her art teacher to fail her! They become involved, their affair complicated when Izzy become pregnant--"the elephant in the womb," as Izzy puts it, overwhelms him.
The art teacher is depressive and can't deal with a baby although he loves Izzy. Izzy won't get an abortion. When the teacher commits suicide his mother comes to Izzy with a proposition: she will fund the prenatal care and birth of her son's baby if Izzy joins an experimental community.
Dr. Grind is the product of parents who developed a childraising technique which has left him with lasting problems. He dreams of a community where children are raised by a 'village' and are not dependant on one set of flawed parents. His system will support the children with the intention of allowing them to flourish to their full potential.
Izzy joins as the only single mother. Over seven years the families struggle to change their natural instincts while developing as a community. Healthy relationships are built but also unhealthy relationships evolve which threatened to dissolve the experiment.
Wilson implies that loving parents can inflict lasting damage on their children and that the children of distant parents can rise above and thrive. Dr. Grind's dream of a Utopian community that protects children only fails because adults are predictably imperfect. In the end, a perfect little world is whatever family we can cobble together.
The book club had a long conversation about the changing nature of families over their lifetimes. Specifically, how once families lived near each other and were a support group before suburban living reinforced the nuclear family as the norm. A woman who ran a daycare said that she had observed all the problems encountered by the extended family in the book.
A Perfect Little World was a book club read. I thank the public library for a copy of the book.
But that's the problem, isn't it? We're mysteries to each other no matter how hard we try to prove otherwise. from Perfect Little World
