I had to go to San Antonio last week, which is not a straight hop from here (what is?) so I had lots of plane time to catch up on my reading. By some gross miscalculation, I finished Our Mutual Friend a full half-hour before my second flight landed in San An, and I had no backup reading material. That hasn’t happened to me in ages, and I spent the final minutes in a minor panic, reading the endnotes, the introduction, and the biographical notes in an effort to fill the time.

I was determined not to let that happen on the return flights, so I bought two books: Little Children by Tom Perrotta, and Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky. Good forethought, there, because I finished Little Children just as the first leg was touching down.

I chose Little Children because the author is speaking at our town’s literary festival this weekend, on the process of adapting a book to a screenplay, and I would like to attend his session. Also, I have a practically meaningless Brush-with-Celebrity as far as Tom Perrotta is concerned: A friend of a friend of mine is his neighbor, and she beaded a necklace that his wife wore to the Academy Awards. I know! We’re practically BFFs!

Anyway, not having seen the movie, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I did enjoy the book despite its being a lightning-fast read and therefore, based on the time spent entertaining me, a poor return on investment. The story is a kind of suburban reworking of Madame Bovary, the characters a bunch of stay-at-home parents and their spouses. One of the stay-at-homes is a dad, and he and one of the moms embark on an affair. A rather sad pedophile hovers on the sidelines. He is played in the film by Jackie Earle Haley, formerly of The Bad News Bears, one of the seminal films of my childhood. For this reason alone, I’m dying to see it.

One of the passel of SAHMs, Mary Ann, was a stereotypical perfect pearls-wearing life-sacrificing Martha-Stewart-channeling mom, and she was the one major fault I found in the characterizations. She’s the type of woman who chides her four-year-old to keep his sights on Harvard, and she criticizes the slacker mom of the group for forgetting a snack for her daughter at the playground: “That’s the second time this week.” My hackles went up at that because I am always forgetting snacks and I don’t know anyone who would make that kind of comment. But that’s irrelevant; the point is that Deluded Super SAHM and her evil twin, Bitchy Career Mom, are just cliches spawned by marketers to sell us stuff: goods, services, social agendas.

It’s not only the conservative media who pushes these stereotypes. In today’s New York Times editorial page, in fact, Linda Hirshman trotted out the image of the upper-middle-class SAHM losing brain cells, respect, and earning potential by taking a few years off to be with her kids. Her point was to exhort mothers to get back into the workforce, and she wasn’t just concerned about the women who would prefer to work but can’t swing the day care. She thinks it’s just as important to change attitudes of educated, potentially high-earning women who elect to stay home, because “participation in public life allows women to use their talents and to powerfully affect society.And once they leave, they usually cannot regain the income or status they had.” Although highly educated, you SAHMs are apparently not bright enough to know what’s good for you, but she does. Then she gets in these zingers:

That the most educated have opted out the most should raise questions about how our society allocates scarce educational resources. The next generation of girls will have a greatly reduced pool of role models.

What the hell? Is she suggesting that women who want to stay at home for any length of time should be banned from the university?! Ouch. I’m glad I chose to work. Until I see the opposite stereotype, that is: the ambitious harridan whose decision to have “other people raise her kids” results in increased behavior problems for the kids as they grow up.

The stereotypes in the media are here to stay, but stereotypes in a novel are just lazy writing. I’m sure Mr. Perrotta will be grateful for my notes when I see him on Saturday.