‘Joe College’, Tom Perrotta

One of the joys of living in Boston is the awareness of being in the near-presence of greatness. From my office window (OK, OK, the office with a window adjacent to my windowless Dilbert cube) I can see MIT just over the river, and Harvard in the distance, and since I’ve been here I’ve regularly discovered that all manner of people I admire live within a ten mile radius of my house. I’ve yet to lose the frisson of excitement I get each time I exit Harvard Square T on the off-chance I collide into Steven Pinker or thwack into Noam Chomsky. That said, I also find it disconcerting.

Ever since I was a teenager and started loving certain authors (and musicians, much in the same way) it threw me to realize that they’re real people, who one could actually meet. The first few concerts I went to of bands I loved were quite unsettling, and even now I have a tendency to leave them slightly unnerved. Quite why I have trouble reconciling my perceptions of artists with the flesh and blood reality I’m not entirely sure. With musicians, it’s certainly disappointing if, in the rambling between songs, they turn out not to be the witty, erudite, strikingly intelligent people that I’d assumed they would be (luckily dear Neil Hannon is quite as wonderful as the image he creates), or worse still, a bit off-putting (Michael Stipe certainly falls into this camp on occasion). Similarly, I have met a few authors and journalists who turn out not to be quite what I’d imagined. I recently heard at a party that one of my favourite UK journalists who writes on science in the media is actually a rather grumpy misanthrope. But even aside from this occasional gap with my expectations, the fact that these people are just people, and live their lives much like me, still sits strangely. Perhaps it’s the perception that if they inhabit the same world as me, and achieve what they do, then really I should too. But enough amateur psychoanalysis! This is all just a long way of saying, it turns out Tom Perrotta lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, which local readers will know is just north of Boston, and non-locals will now have learned. However I’m slightly more sanguine about the idea of Perrotta existing (I’m sure he’ll be immensely relieved) because based on his books I would imagine he’s a fairly normal person; not flashy, just a good story teller with a characteristic turn of phrase.

Perrotta strikes a balance in his writing which suits me very well: novels with fairly complex ideas, but with a plot that moves along at a clip and pleasingly realistic first person narrators. I first encountered him without realizing it when I saw ‘Election’, which embarrassingly rang a little more true than I might wish to admit (the slightly overambitious school swot bit, not the having an affair with a teacher bit, before you speculate). I then read ‘The Abstinence Teacher’ a few months ago (highly recommended even if it’s a little trite at the end), and saw the film of ‘Little Children’ (also set in Northern Massachusetts although at that point I had no idea he lived in the area). ‘Joe College’ is in a similar vein and style: a coming-of-age novel about a boy from a poor New Jersey background who goes to Yale and oscillates between the two worlds. I enjoyed it, as made clear by the fact I read it in three days, but Perrotta’s weakness is undoubtedly a tendency for overly ‘finished’ endings, which neatly tie up and where the right thing almost always happens (certainly a more complex issue in Little Children, given the subject matter, and yet a certain sort of moral rightness still prevails). A little more cynicism would work better for me, and hey, if I bump into him in J.P. Lick’s or Copley Square I’ll be sure to let him know – for such is the joy of locally-residing authors.