If at any time over the next 12 months you start to feel election fatigue setting in, here's one good reason to grin and bear the partisan bickering: Tom Perrotta could be getting a novel out of it. "Maybe it's masochism," the author and avowed political junkie confesses to me at his kitchen table in suburban Belmont, Massachusetts, "but I spend a lot of time watching Fox News. I'm sort of riveted by Bill O'Reilly." Perrotta leans back casually in his chair on this sunny afternoon and laughs at this disclosure. "I'm interested in the American right in some ways more than I am in the left, even if I vote with the liberals."

The author of the sleeper hit Election and the best-selling Little Children is about to hit the campaign trail for his new novel, The Abstinence Teacher, a startlingly relevant and stunningly perceptive examination of the evangelical takeover of American exurbia. The book came into being, Perrotta explains, in the wake of the 2004 presidential race, with so-called values voters widely credited for tipping the election in George W. Bush's favor. "It almost seemed like a reproach," he admits with refreshing modesty, the same quality that sets his slender and tightly plotted novels apart from other, more self-conscious tomes dedicated to the last superpower's roiling psyche. "I mean, this is my country, and I'm supposed to be someone who understands it. Basically, I had this creeping sense that I had missed something enormous."

So what did Perrotta do about it? Fans of Alexander Payne's already classic film adaptation of Election will be tickled to learn that Perrotta, now 46 and a father of two, has taken another stab at high school. The Abstinence Teacher charts the unlikely meeting of minds—and possibly much more—between Ruth Ramsey, a divorced human sexuality instructor with traditionally liberal ideas about the deed ("Like any sex educator worth her salt, Ruth was a big fan of latex condoms"), and Tim Mason, a recovering drug user, former small-time rock 'n' roller, soccer coach to Ruth's daughter Maggie, and member of the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, an evangelical church housed in a former Fashion Bug on the outskirts of Stonewood Heights, USA. The book's inciting event is an offhand endorsement of oral sex in the classroom that leads to Ruth's replacement by a sexy virgin and advocate of Wise Choices for Teens (aka abstinence), JoAnn Marlow. And then there's the impromptu postmatch prayer on the soccer field that draws Ruth's ire and inspires the Tabernacle's fiery spiritual leader, Pastor Dennis, to proclaim Tim a soldier in the culture wars.

Word is already out, of course, and Perrotta—who received both Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for his screenplay of Little Children, cowritten with the film's director, Todd Field—is adapting The Abstinence Teacher for Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the directing team behind Little Miss Sunshine. "When you're writing a novel, it seems sort of lonely and endless," Perrotta says of his primary vocation. "And when you write scripts, it's more fun and social." He compares the collaborative process of making a film to being in a band—an experience Perrotta regrets never taking part in himself but that he describes in his first novel, The Wishbones. I can't help noticing, as we talk, that one of the books in a stack beside me on the kitchen table is Hey Ho, Let's Go: The Story of the Ramones. "I've always felt like, if I had musical talent," he goes on with some wistfulness, "the ideal state in life would be to be in a rock band."