“By and large, literary writers working for Hollywood have not had great luck at it… Until Tom Perrotta came along, that is. Perrotta, whose novels Election and Little Children were made into acclaimed films by Alexander Payne and Todd Field, respectively, is now most of the way through adapting his new novel, The Abstinence Teacher… It’s a sign of the excitement over Perrotta’s work that the screenplay was almost done before the novel.”