Joe College [Hardcover]

Tom Perrotta (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2000

The acclaimed author of Election and The Wishbones takes on the ultimate crucible of personal reinvention--college.

For many Ivy League college students, spring break means a raucous road trip to a spot in the sun. For Danny, a Yale junior, the spring of 1982 means two weeks behind the wheel of the "Roach Coach," his dad's lunch truck in central New Jersey. But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try and make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently-dropped bombshell to contend with. And there's also lissome Polly in New Haven--with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor. If girl problems aren't enough, there's the menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thugs who think Danny has planted the "Roach Coach" in their territory.

Populated by a vividly drawn cast of characters, Joe College is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funniest fiction yet, a comic journey into the dark side of love, higher education and food service.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Having penned Election, a great novel of high-school manners, Tom Perrotta gives us Joe College, a great novel about college mores. In 1982, one Yale junior struggles with George Eliot, dorm blanket bingo, dining-hall dish-line duty, a massive crush on a girl in love with his favorite prof, daily cards and calls from a girl back home in New Jersey, and a lush profusion of authentically individual yet instantly recognizable undergrad eccentrics. After an evening of ritualistic bong hits, kimchee feasting, and sympathetic discussion of Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who shot President McKinley, Danny thinks of his parents: "Was this what they scrimped and sacrificed for all those years? So their son could spend his Tuesday nights drinking beer, smoking dope, eating weird food, and learning to see the assassin's side of the story?"

Yup, that's the way it was, and Perrotta's immense strength is to give moment-by-moment immediacy to his hero's tortuous internal monologue. Instead of dumping his Jersey girl, Danny figures, "if I avoided her long enough, she'd get tired of waiting and supply my half of the conversation on her own, thereby sparing me the unpleasantness of having to be the bad guy." Yet he is also capable of heroism, as when he impulsively defies no-neck Mafiosi who menace his dad's "Roach Coach" lunch truck, which Danny drives to blue-collar work sites during school breaks. What gives the story structure is the collision in our hero's soul between his former life and the world of towers, moats, and upward mobility. He can't quite identify with his hometown reverence for Bruce Springsteen, but it rubs him wrong to see Springsteen LPs played "for the enjoyment of people who were going to end up being the bosses of the people the Boss was singing about. Nobody in Entryway C was born to run."

Election may have a better plot, but Joe College scoots along like a waterskeeter on a marvelous stream of consciousness. Tom Perrotta was born to write. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly

HYale junior Danny is the winning narrator of Perrotta's fourth bookD"winning" not just because he's smart and funny, but also because when it comes to college life, love and misbehavior, the guy always comes out on top. Conflicts in his life are neatly resolved through acts of grace or circumstance. Driving drunk on his spring break, Danny gets pulled over for a busted headlightDby a policeman who turns out to be an old high school friend. At school, the girl he likes calls him out of the blue to say she wants to sleep with him. And back home in New Jersey, his girlfriend, Cindy, pregnant with his child, makes a life-changing decision that leaves Danny free of guilt and responsibility. The resulting portrait is of a picaresque hero who's not just charming but charmed, a befuddled na f easily embracing everything life throws his way. Set in 1982, the novel is studded with references to that era's pop cultureDKansas songs on the radio; Jodie Foster sightings on campus. But the book's appeal is in its idiosyncrasies, not its name-dropping. Danny spends his spring break behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck, and must fend off the hostile Lunch Monsters, a gang of New Jersey thugs who want to steal his father's route. Story lines like that one prove that Perrotta (Election; The Wishbones) is in full control of his quirky comic sensibility, and they make it easy to root for Danny as he navigates his way from his blue-collar past to his privileged future. The novel leaves some loose ends hanging, but after things fall so neatly into place for its narrator, that comes as a reliefDa reminder that art, like life, isn't perfect after all. (Sept.) FYI: Perrotta's Election was made into a film starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312261845
• ISBN-13: 978-0312261849
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #920,223 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Book - But Not Perrotta's Best, October 26, 2000

By 

Philip C. O'Donoghue "Phil O'Donoghue" (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Joe College (Hardcover)

I first read about Tom Perrotta in the New York Times Book Review, when "The Wishbones" came out. Rarely have I had such an enjoyable read. As a native of New Jersey who was best man in a classic Northern Jersey, blue collar wedding, Perrotta astounded me with his ability to get his characters, dialog, and plot lines just right. When "Election" came out, I read it in one morning on a beach in Mexico, but once again, felt transported to my teenage days in New Jersey. And finally, I read Perrotta's first book, "Bad Haircut - Stories of the '70's," and found that to be a gem as well.

Which was why I found "Joe College" a disappointment. Perhaps it was a matter of reaching too far, but this novel found the author floundering a bit. While Perrotta still builds likable, yet complicated characters, in this novel he tried to build too much into it, and the result was at times, a muddled picture. I felt there were one or two subplots that could have been cut, which would have allowed the author to spend more time developing the principle characters.

Don't get me wrong - I still recommend this book. Even if it is not Perrotta's best novel, Tom Perrotta at 80% is better than most novelists at 100%. Immediately upon finishing this, I found myself calling a good friend of mine who graduated from Yale in the 80's and told him to buy this book - pronto. And I also loved Perrotta's protagonist's way of balancing not only the two worlds he lived in, that of the traditional ivy-covered walls of Yale, against his blue collar, working class hometown in New Jersey, but also the Yale of his dreams and expectations against the Yale that he actually found. And I also could completely identify with the frustration of the protagonist's love life- the hopes, the let down's, the stops, the starts.

Ultimately, I think "Joe College" will represent another level for Tom Perrotta. This novel was a bit darker, deeper and complicated than his previous ones. Perrotta is growing as a writer, and while this novel may seem like a small set- back, I still wholeheartedly recommend it. As I said, a Perrotta novel that falls slightly short of expectations is still better than most novels out there.

And I can't wait for his next one.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Cad's Self Discovery, October 20, 2000

By 

Michael K. McKeon - See all my reviews

This review is from: Joe College (Hardcover)

Based upon the reviews I had high expectations for this book. The theme is enticing: a lower middle class New Jersey guy's adjustment and transformation at a citadel of America's economic and intellectual elite. The first quarter of the book suggests that it might fulfill the potential of such a plot. However, it meanders and fizzles out, and concludes with a surrealistic ending incompatible with the rest of the novel.

In terms of the broader issues, the protagonist Danny comes across as a callow self centered, albeit good natured, guy who is willing to turn his back as well as step on friends and family rather than let them thwart his chance at escaping blue collar New Jersey after having securing access to America's highest strata at Yale. While he suffers some minor angst over his increasing detachment from his working class origins he increasingly owns, and justifies, an elitist attitude and values as well as distain for the culture of the hoi polli. This sense of meritocratic entitlement and fear of falling manifests itself in a callous, craven, and callow failure to return calls, much less confront his responsibility after impregnating a working class girl (from a social set he didn't risk mingling with in high school) who alleviated his boredom one summer home from college. While seemingly macho in confronting mob muscle attempting to frighten him off his father's lunch business route, the impetus appears more his ego, as he shows a callous disregard for the economic and physical danger this presents his family.

The book is honest, it is frank, unfortunately it is probably very realistic. The protagonist and his self discovery describe a vain man made increasingly unattractive by his quest to secure access to success. Disappointing, the hubris he meets at the end is insufficiently developed. After being delayed throughout the novel, the comeuppance warranted further development.

I can fully appreciate a dark plot and sinister characters. However, I really don't think that Perrotta intended to represent Danny as a cad. However, in reality these may accurately be the type of the characteristics and values acquired by those who secure success by upper movement through academia, where one quickly seeks to distance himself from unrefined origins once receiving access to the "top". The book also, uncomfortably perceptively, recognizes the arrogance of those advancing through academia who feel that while they are entitled to such upward movement, others are not. This novel leads the reader to view the success and values of the meritocracy with a jaundiced eye. However, I don't think that was the author's intent; I think Perrotta wanted to depict the pitfalls which might inexplicably confront a regular working class "good guy" once he earns the access to this rarified strata.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For Recovering English Majors Everywhere!, September 7, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Joe College (Hardcover)

A wonderful novel which will satisfy any self-reflective needs for someone who came of age after disco but before the Go Go 80's. Danny, the first person narrator, is a working class Italian American kid from New Jersey who is here moving into his Junior year at Yale. He straddles these worlds with a freshly romantic appreciation for the peculiarities of both. His father drives a lunch truck and Danny helps out during summer and spring breaks and it is on this job that he reconnects with a high school acquaintance Cindy. Their halting relationship (she really loves him) creates the third act complication which follows Danny north to New Haven and his whole other life as a promising English Major and possible leading man for Polly, the social opposite of Cindy. It's not easy to call this book monumental because the events of the book are very personal and sort of soft, but the accretion of detail, and the rhythm and echoes between the characters and their scenes create a wonderful overall effect. Perratta is working with the huge American contradiction of what is earned and what is given and his first-person character is a bridge between a father who has made his income with his back (actually, his butt, but nevermind that) and his own future which will be built with his mind. Perratta mines Yale in the 80's for wonderful scenes of gifted children in the throes of their own amusement. And the thrown-off tone and approach of the storytelling actually conceals a deep and incisive portrait of a generation now taking charge of all of our futures.

A splendid read and highly recommended