Measured prose

In Nine Inches, Tom Perrotta returns to familiar terrain (amid fading light)

The following review has been posted on the Books page at the History News Network.

This summer I taught a class of largely minority students facing varying degrees of academic challenges. Seeking to give them a diet of adolescent-friendly fare for discussion and writing, I turned to figures like Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco and the Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz, to whom I was confident they could relate. Although I was less confident about it, I also decided to use Tom Perrotta's 1994 debut collection of short stories, Bad Haircut, which traces the life of a 1970s adolescent named Buddy from middle school through his high school graduation. (The juxtaposition with Diaz, another New Jersey chronicler of the suburbs whose fiction also includes subjects like coming to terms with the homosexuality of friends, proved to be quite arresting.) I'm happy to say my students loved Bad Haircut.

Having followed Perrotta through a half-dozen subsequent novels -- among them the bestselling Little Children (which was made into a movie) and The Leftovers (soon to be an HBO series) -- I was pleased to learn that his new book, Nine Inches, would be his second story collection. Unlike Bad Haircut, which followed a single character, these stories, many set in the fictional town of Gifford, (presumably not far from the imaginary Cranwood of Bad Haircut), depict a range of people, from high school students to senior citizens, policemen to doctors, solid citizens to small-time criminals. It's inevitable, then, that this collection would not have quite have the narrative cohesion of the first one.

Thematically, however, Nine Inches is surprisingly tight -- and surprisingly grim. Perrotta has been called "an American Chekov" and "the Steinbeck of suburbia," but the mood of this book is closer to the early James Joyce of The Dubliners, where protagonists have negative epiphanies in which they confront limitations they'd managed to avoid recognizing they have. Those limitations include character defects, like the math teacher of "Grade My Teacher," who, in disclosing more than she should to a student, hesitates "long enough to realize she was making a mistake, then kept going" (and going). They also include recognizing dreams that will never be fulfilled, like those of the regretful, abusive father of "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face"or the amateur blues guitarists of "One-Four-Five," who know they can never compensate for the families they have lost.

This sense of despair infects even 21st century Perrotta adolescents, of whom he writes with same assured air that he does of nineties kids in Election or seventies teens in Bad Haircut (he acknowledges his late-adolescent children as the source of anecdotes that "blossomed into stories"). Perrotta was far too satirical -- and far too realistic -- to ever suggest that the intensity of Tracy Flick in Election or the passivity of Dave Raymond in The Wishbones would ever be transformed much later in their lives. Still, you could have a sense of hope for them that's harder to feel for the concussion-stricken football player of "Senior Season" or the cynical protagonist of "The Test Taker," who impersonates his fellow students on the SATs. "I honestly didn't mind cheating for strangers," he explains. "If somebody wanted to pay me to help them get into a good college, I didn't see anything wrong with that. It wasn't all that different from hiring an expensive tutor, or getting a doctor diagnose a learning disability so you could buy yourself some extra time. That was just the way the system worked." He gets his comeuppance (and strikes back in ways that may make you feel complicit in your satisfaction), just as the retired narrator of "Kiddie Pool" is repaid for trespassing in his neighbor's garage with an unwelcome discovery.

To at least some extent, the downbeat mood of Nine Inches is offset by the sheer narrative invention in some of these stories. Donald, the narrator of "Backrub," who somehow managed to not to get into one of the twelve colleges to which he applied, finds himself stopped repeatedly by a policeman, who makes an unexpected demand (to which the Donald responds in an unexpected way before making an unexpected revelation). "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face" is a particularly intricate story, weaving a father's confession and adult psychodrama through an exciting rendition of a Little League championship game. The title story, which refers to the distance eighth graders must maintain at a middle school dance, is marked by a notably graceful contrapuntal style of storytelling that is Perrotta's trademark.

Perrotta's last book, The Leftovers, was very clearly an attempt to break new creative ground by venturing into the world of science fiction -- and bending the genre in a distinctly literary direction. In that light, it's possible to see Nine Inches as a retreat onto more familiar terrain. But for my money this is a more satisfying book, because it showcases a writer on his home turf, working within a familiar framework with uncommon power.

Though he ends the book on a lighter note with a redemptive story of second chances, I'm nevertheless saddened by the receding sense of possibility that seems to mark Perrotta's vision. Or maybe like the characters of these stories, I too am belatedly waking up to the reality he's been describing all along. The historical context for Nine Inches is worth noting: demographers are telling us that the suburbs are less attractive than they used to be for young people, who are returning to cities in numbers that have not been seen in close to a century. (One of the more memorable stories of Bad Haircut was "You Learn to Live," about the great adolescent ritual of learning to drive, which teenagers are doing less frequently now.)

I find the angst here a little curious because at least superficially, it would seem that Perrotta, himself a product of New Jersey, ripened artistically on a suburban vine. Of course it would be stupid to suggest hypocrisy -- as an artist, he has to call 'em as he sees 'em, and it's likely that a Perrotta story set in a high-rise or on a farm would also be marked by negative epiphanies.  As someone who has also staked his ground in the suburbs, I can't help but hope that a future filing from the village will be more promising. But maybe that's another way I'm like the people of those stories, waiting for my train to come in.

Book of Revelation

In The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta shows us the Rapture -- in all its confusing clarity

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.

In the novels of Tom Perrotta, characters repeatedly stumble into the gap between high-minded ideals and far messier realities. Football coaches, high school history teachers, even knowledgeable and determined prospective brides establish standards that others are expected to follow. Perrotta protagonists are less angry than bemused by these (often self-appointed) authority figures, who always prove fallible, and in many cases feel some inclination to follow them. But they find their instinctive skepticism, and the pull of other, also fallible impulses, leads them to (often passive) resistance. They're decent people, though, and over the course of the story resolve internal and external tensions by arriving a point where, in the parlance of contemporary pop psychology, they "own" their decisions.

Perrotta's new novel, The Leftovers, continues this tradition. But at least initially, it feels very different. That's because it's a surprising foray into what could plausibly be called science fiction. The Leftovers offers us a Rapture scenario: a world in which a significant minority of the human population suddenly disappears without warning. The twist is that no one can really make sense of the disaster, which is widely experienced as entirely random. This is especially disturbing to those with religious inclinations; as apocalypses go, this one is deeply disappointing in the utterly inscrutable way in which both wheat and chaff both seem to go and get Left Behind.

This is not Perrotta's first foray into religious subjects. His 2007 novel The Abstinence Teacher focused on a culture clash between liberal secularists and evangelicals over control over a school curriculum. Still, it's considerably more ambitious in trying to realistically imagine an alternative world, and its success in capturing granular facets of reality in the way it plays out in the (presumably New Jersey) suburb of Mapleton is the best thing about it. It's high praise indeed when Stephen King -- whose own gifts as a writer and critic went too long unratified -- gives your novel a ringing endorsement on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

There will no doubt be readers, prospective and otherwise, who chuckle approvingly at the premise of The Leftovers, which seems to be a satire of religious commitment. In the epistemological vacuum that follows in the wake of what is collectively dubbed the Sudden Departure, a wide array ad-hoc groups form to succor -- and exploit -- the grieving. There's the Guilty Remnant, whose members socialize their resources, wear white sheets, and smoke cigarettes ritualistically. There's the Holy Wayners, whose founder manages to convince his followers that the disappearance of his son will be redeemed by the birth of another by one of a growing cadre of teenage lovers. There are also the Barefoot People, whose Old Testament is essentially Woodstock. Perrotta's sense of humor, which guarantees at least one good belly laugh per novel, is in fine form here.

The narrative core of the novel forms around the four members of the Garvey family -- Laurie, Tom, Jill and Kevin -- which, strictly speaking, survives the Sudden Departure intact. But the lives of all four are upended by it, and it sends them in centrifugal directions. Laurie, much to her own surprise, finds herself joining the Guilty Remnant. Tom, in college at Syracuse at the time, falls in with Holy Wayne himself and ends up caring for the preacher's pregnant bride. For much of the novel, the and the girl are virtually on the lam, masquerading as Barefoot People. Jill, shattered by her mother's abandonment, shaves her head, ceases her A-level work as a high school senior, and falls under the subversive sway of a charismatic classmate. She and her ambiguous new pal live with Kevin, the mayor of Mapleton, who tries to do the impossible by maintaining a sense of normalcy. (One of the more felicitous developments of Perrotta's fiction in recent years is the emergence of flawed, but still admirable, father figures.) Kevin befriends a fifth major character, Nora Durst, whose husband and children did disappear in the Sudden Departure and is emotionally leveled by the catastrophe. One plotline concerns whether she and Kevin will be able to build an emotional bridge to each other and begin their lives anew.

In what could be termed a further experimentation in genre, Perrotta also introduces a murder-mystery subplot. But it feels like a false step, less for aesthetic reasons than ideological ones. One way he keeps a sense of secular self-congratulation in check is his characteristic virtue of distributing sympathy widely. But in the end, it seems, every serious attempt at a spiritual response to the Sudden Departure must be shown as morally bankrupt. That seems like a cheap shot. Actually, far from a resounding refutation of faith, the Sudden Departure's lack of apparent design is in an important sense appropriate: a God whose ways are comprehensible isn't much of a God at all. Secularists tend to see faith as a crutch, which it sometimes is, but as often or not it's a struggle against futility that requires considerable discipline amid doubt. (That's the problem with New Age groups like the Barefoot People: they seem to consider friction, particularly institutional friction, a vice.) We get some sense of authentic struggle with Laurie, which ends up feeling a bit short-circuited. The skullduggery seems unnecessary.

The narrative detour also seems unnecessary because Perrotta does such a good job of bringing each character's journey to a satisfying conclusion by hitting that sweet spot of seeming both unexpected and inevitable at the same time. He really is an immensely talented writer. And a highly cinematic one: it's easy to envision The Leftovers joining Election (1998) and Little Children (2004) as movies, though I keep hoping that someone will make a good one of his wonderful debut collection of connected short stories, Bad Haircut (1994). Six novels later, it's time to stop comparing Perrotta to writers like Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, even Anton Chekov. We've reached the point where we can start referring to other writers to Perrottaesque. The fictional universe he's created is recognizably his -- and ours.