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by Jeff Sypeck The protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s latest novel straddles two worlds: Yale, where he edits a literary magazine and immerses himself in the writing of George Eliot; and New Jersey, where he helps his father drive a snack truck between industrial parks while avoiding pathetic local extortionists. How Danny negotiates this double life, with the challenge it presents to his own identity, is the subject of Joe College - a breezy academic novel that distinguishes itself not with cutting insights about college, but instead in the nuanced, sincere and thoroughly entertaining depictions of suburban life that have become Perrotta’s trademark. Best known for his novel Election and the film it inspired, Perrotta has explored the world of suburban New Jersey several times before, in the short-story collection Bad Haircut, as well as in The Wishbones, a funny and touching novel about an aging wedding-band guitarist forced by his long-suffering girlfriend to confront adulthood. In Joe College, a Tom Perrotta hero once again gropes toward self-definition, stumbling tragicomically toward an uncertain future. Joe College at first appears simply to be a standard coming-of-age novel as Danny, overwhelmed by life at Yale, eats kimchee for the first time and awkwardly learns to dance. Consequently, the growing doubts he has about college life manifest themselves in some cleverly rendered passages that hint at an interesting (and in current literature, rarely explored) conflict between his suburban roots and the brainy, immodest Ivy League world he has entered: But despite Danny’s common-sense soul-searching about his expensive education, Perrotta’s take on Yale is often disappointingly noncommittal. He hints at the campus’s frequent absurdities, but only readers already predisposed to dislike rampant over-intellectualism and the insane ubiquity of a cappella music will see Joe College as critical of Yale culture. Unlikely to recognize Perrotta’s achingly light attempts at criticism, Yale alumni may even read the novel with a certain soggy nostalgia - even as the author chooses bland caricature over interesting, and perhaps pejorative, characterization. Danny remarks with bemusement that "[w]hen I arrived at Yale in 1979, I’d been totally unprepared for the centrality of singing groups to campus life, the excitement that surrounded the news that so-and-so had been tapped to be a Spizzwink or an Alley Cat." But Perrotta, who attended Yale during the 1980s, appears unwilling to treat the university’s culture any more harshly than acknowledging that well documented quirkiness. In addition, Danny’s friends and colleagues are little more than types: the embittered townie dining-hall manager; the popular young professor who sleeps with his students; the misguided plagiarist; and so on. One wears a cape to parties and browbeats passers-by into accommodating his one-sided academic arguments; another badgers Danny’s parents with trite intellectualism: Matt perplexed my parents with a barrage of devil’s advocate-style questions meant to provoke serious discussion of controversial issues, not my family’s preferred method for killing the time on long car rides. Didn’t they think everyone should spend at least one night in jail, just to know what it was like? Didn’t the Iranian militants have a point about the U.S. being the Great Satan, at least from their perspective? And really, what was the difference between a religion and a cult? Looked at from a certain angle, wasn’t the Pope every bit as preposterous as L. Ron Hubbard or Sun Myung Moon? And what was the story with deodorants? It’s not clear at first that Perrotta has saved his most incisive observations for the novel’s New Jersey scenes. His depiction of Danny’s girlfriend, Cindy, and her breathless exegesis of Bruce Springsteen lyrics closely courts stereotype, and a subplot about some minor Mafioso maneuverings in the suburban lunch-truck industry initially seems headed for a dreadfully predictable conclusion. But Cindy - derisively known to Danny’s Yale friends, due to her occupation, as "his secretary" - is allowed a depth and wisdom that Perrotta gently reveals only by inference as the book progresses; and the dramatic, small-time cosa nostra goings-on Danny encounters when he substitutes as the lunch-truck driver during his father’s convalescence from hemorrhoid surgery are sublimely unexpected. Perrotta ’s Yale may be a two-dimensional diorama of a cappella zombies, but his New Jersey - populated with absurd but highly believable characters like the wonderfully volatile "Psycho Midget" - rings with the grungy truth of feedback from a beloved old amplifier. Unfortunately, because of the misbalanced contrast between an Ivy League campus and the New Jersey suburbs, Perrotta’s main goal - depicting the challenges of straddling two worlds - remains much less developed than it ought to be. Perrotta, a native of the North Jersey suburbs and now a professor at Harvard, must surely have some thoughts on the matter; regrettably, he shares few of them. He may do this deliberately, since Danny is much less thoughtful and reflective than he himself thinks he is; Perrotta, on the other hand, is at his best when evoking a suburban contentment that can only be motivated by nostalgia:
Danny’s honest and resolute sentiments contrast sharply with other recent depictions of New Jersey. In the films Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, writer-director Todd Solondz depicts the New Jersey suburbs as a dangerous and disingenuous place: Flimsy facades hide a Hobbesian Garden State of nature inhabited by the selfish, the callous and the perverted. But hasn’t it been nearly half a century since anyone truly believed that the suburbs were clean, safe and teeth-gleamingly perfect? The overly hyped American Beauty perpetuated that caricature, and its supposed hypocrisy, as its fundamental premise; Perrotta instead chronicles the suburbs as they actually are, a place of complex emotions. His characters more closely resemble the low-key, underachieving heroes of the films of Kevin Smith: burnouts who bumble through obscure state colleges, covet comics and sports memorabilia, and debate with Talmudic precision whether their local classic rock station should bleep the words "funky shit" out of "Big Ol’ Jet Airliner." Perrotta shares Smith’s appreciation for the lives and loves of such characters, and his portrayals of Danny, his family and their pantheon of neighbors and co-workers are deeply rooted not only in truth, but also in genuine affection. Perrotta hasn’t written the ultimate novel of academia; Joe College is unlikely to share shelf space with Lucky Jim in the lacquer-paneled dens of tenured professors everywhere. Perrotta’s prose is far too modest and unremarkable for that distinction, and he is clearly more interested in telling a story than in dwelling on clever turns of phrase or hashing out complex issues of class and education. As a result, Joe College is a breezy novella with a narrative voice that skims along the surface, takes the reader around a few genuine plot twists, and ends on an ambiguous and indecisive note. Its author seems to have intended little more, but like a simple pop song rather than a 14-minute progressive-rock extravaganza, a pared-down approach may best suit the subject matter of Joe College anyway. In this novel, Perrotta treads the crabgrass in a benighted literary subdivision, bravely acknowledging a pleasant truth that few writers with Ivy League degrees and literary pretensions dare: the simple dignity of modest dreams. Jeff Sypeck grew up in New Jersey and teaches literature at the University of Maryland University College. His best friend’s younger sister knows Jon Bon Jovi’s second cousin. Enter the Pop Forum
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