Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies (Paperback)

~ (Author) "My mother was a den mother, but she wasn't fanatical about it..." (more)
Key Phrases: Wiener Man, Bill Floyd, Little League (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Amid the current glut of '70s nostalgia, Perrotta has fashioned a moving cycle of stories that looks past the era's celebrated kitsch to still relevant social and cultural issues and the timeless mysteries of growing up. In 10 tales covering a period from the fall of 1969 to the summer of 1980, he follows the revelations of his narrator, Buddy, from his days as an eight-year-old Cub Scout through his return home from the first year of college. Set in the small New Jersey town of Darwin, these seamless, understated narratives find--in boyhood activities as ordinary as playing sports, riding a bike, taking driver's ed or going to the prom--insights into loneliness, societal violence, sexual identity, racism, mortality and much more. Perrotta eschews sentimentality and overt philosophizing, crafting in Buddy's voice a sensitivity to pregnant moments that remain unexplained and a knack for delicate, unobtrusive metaphor. Forgoing the easy irony of disco and vintage TV, he delivers a convincing portrait of a time of life, illuminating all the profound cruelty and tenderness of adolescence.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

This collection of vignettes about growing up features a protagonist named Buddy. The era is the late Seventies, the place is semifictional Cranwood in northern New Jersey, and Buddy's age is pre-to late teens. No matter what the decade, growing up is growing up-painful, embarrassing, traumatic, bittersweet-and it is ably captured here. We read of Buddy's encounter with the Wiener Man, his first multispeed bike, and how friend Kevin finds a way to rip off his stepfather. As Buddy matures story by story, he moves on to his first encounter with racial hatred, time on the football team, loss of virginity, senior prom, and so on until he is ready for college. Buddy has struggled into the adult world. In the last story we find a nice young man who would be easy to like should we happen to meet him. Perrotta, a new, young, fresh writer, remembers how it was to be young and writes with humor and clarity. Recommended.
Dawn L. Anderson, North Richland Hills P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade (April 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 042515954X
• ISBN-13: 978-0425159545
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #119,079 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Are You a Child of the 70s...?, April 6, 2007

By	Ken C. (MA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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Yes, you'll enjoy BAD HAIRCUT in a big way if you grew up in that strange decade we call the 70s, but you can enjoy it for many other reasons as well. If you enjoy short stories, this collection with a common protagonist, the autobiographical Buddy, is sure to whet your appetite for that most concise of genres. If you are a Tom Perrotta fan, you'll be pleased and surprised, as this book offers both the Perrotta hero you've become accustomed to in his novels (young-ish, male, funny) AND it offers the author at his most disciplined as a stylist. The stories contain little "fat," in other words, and thematically tackle all the major sources of boyhood angst from grade school days to college.

The collection starts with "Weiner Man," the tale of Buddy in the cub scouts, a man dressed in an oversized weiner outfit, and his mother who knew Weiner Man from high school. Sweet and strange, it's the perfect gateway into this frank collection. It is followed by stories involving dating, fighting, family, school, drugs, and alcohol. Just your typical, red-blooded New Jersey suburban upbringing, is all. But what a ride.

I feel this book is overlooked for two reasons -- it's an "early" work by an author who later became famous and it's a short story collection, which will always play second fiddle to the novel. Don't let it scare you away, however. Although anyone can enjoy this work, it's almost a sure bet if you're a male boomer out of the 'burbs. So go ahead. Get a haircut. Even if it's bad, they always grow out...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bad Haircut, Stange Decade, GREAT book, December 26, 2001

By	Shawn S. Sullivan (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Tom Perotta has the gift of a great writer. Honesty and the ability to convey not his wishes of the world he/we grew up in but rather the stark reality of it all. We can laugh at it, we can cry about it, but "it" is all there. Comparisons are likely to both haunt and glorify Mr. Perotta - ie Roth, Salinger, Fitzgerald and even Springsteen but he writes in his own straight foward manner. He literally drives home a point in its wonderful and innocent simplicity and allows the reader to take it where he/she will. Tom Perotta is a wonderful writer and story teller we are lucky to have. READ his work. You will be happy you did.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I didn't realize it at the time, but that's when I was really happy." , April 2, 2008

By	Gregory Baird (Morristown, NJ) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

For a Perrotta devotee such as myself, Bad Haircut comes as something of a surprise. It lacks Perrotta's signature style, the acerbic wit and satirical tone that have defined his spectacular novels Election, Little Children: A Novel, and The Abstinence Teacher. It's also a difficult book to classify - too linear and structured overall to adequately call a short story collection, but too broken up into pieces to call a novel. I suppose with this, his first published work, Perrotta was still finding his footing as an author, but it is a tribute to his talent that even while exploring the range of his voice the finished product still works, and very well at that.

As I said, "Bad Haircut" isn't exactly a short story collection but isn't quite a novel. Think of it as slices from the life of a boy named Buddy, who came of age in the turbulent, disco-studded seventies. Each story is a chapter in the stages of his junior high and high school years, with book-ends from 1969 and 1980 to put a frame on the decade. We first meet Buddy as a young Boy Scout innocently star-struck when he meets the Wonderful Wiener Man, who tours the country in a hot dog costume and turns out to have a past connection to Buddy's mother (a first glimpse at the complex blend of humor and drama that imbues Perrotta's current fiction). Over the course of "Bad Haircut" Buddy loses that innocence as he makes all of the mistakes and realizations that typify the American adolescence as a segue into adulthood. In the final installment Buddy attends a funeral after finishing his first year of college, a funeral that will unexpectedly cause him to revisit the innocence of that Boy Scout we first met him as.

It would be remiss of me to say that "Bad Haircut" is more serious than Perrotta's other works, since they all pack weighty themes beneath their farcical exteriors, but it does feel that way thanks to a poetic quality that he seems to have forsaken in those later novels. At first glance "Bad Haircut" seems superficial, but Perrotta's already remarkably deft pen only makes it appear that way. Each story packs a mean punch, and the fact that they flow so easily belies the poetic - and painstaking - structure that they follow. They speak volumes about American life, not just in the seventies, but beyond. Barring the absence of cell phones and the internet, "Bad Haircut" could just as easily take place in today's world.

If I have a complaint it's that even though the stories all follow the same character, each one feels a little too distinct. Buddy seems to have a different set of friends in each story, even though they seem to take place no more than a year apart (in a few instances only a few weeks have passed). And while we get to know the people who populate Buddy's world fairly well, Buddy himself remains something of a mystery. It would almost be possible to believe that each story is about a different teenager who just happens to reside in the same geographic location as the one in the previous story. But that's really a minor complaint, and doesn't impact the quality of the stories very much in the end.

The stories in "Bad Haircut" remind me of another spectacular short story writer, Tobias Wolff - and that is a comparison I never thought I would make. I love, love, love the Perrotta with the wicked sense of humor that I have gotten to know so well, but I would actually love to see him revisit his roots and do something like this again. Maybe someday he will.

Grade: A-

PS In addition to the linked Perrotta novels above, I would also recommend checking out the aforementioned Tobias Wolff's phenomenal Back in the World: Stories. And the film adaptation of Little Children is top notch (as well it should be -- Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay).