Joe College

Starred review from September 4, 2000
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.

September 15, 2000
No one chronicles growing up in suburban New Jersey in the late 1970s and early 1980s better than Perrotta. His short story collection Bad Haircut and first novel The Wishbones hilariously depicted the prolonged adolescence of working-class males in the Garden State. (His second novel, Election, about a high school political contest, became a terrific movie starring Matthew Broderick.) In Joe College, Perrotta moves to the campus of Yale University (although his hero still hails from New Jersey) to continue his witty exploration of young men becoming adults in spite of themselves. Narrator Danny, a Yale junior, is dreading the upcoming spring break; while his wealthier roommates have glamorous vacation plans, Danny faces 392 more grueling pages of George Eliot's Middlemarch, two weeks of driving his father's lunch truck ("the Roach Coach"), and seeing his old girlfriend Cindy, a secretary with a Charley's Angels hairdo and a not very surprising secret to tell him. Although the episodic plot has a pasted-together feel, Perrotta is a master of the light comic touch and wry social observation; his take on yellow highlighters and highlighting techniques is very, very funny ("George Eliot wrote with such sustained profundity that I found myself coloring over line after line after line, sometimes covering entire pages with a thick coat of yellow neon"). For all popular fiction collections.--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2000
Danny is a junior at Yale in 1980, a product of a New Jersey public high school who is pitting his smarts (both street and classroom) against those of the products of Skull and Bones, Choate, and Groton. During semester breaks, Danny works with his father on the family business, Roach Coach, a lunch wagon that services construction sites and factories while trying to avoid the Lunch Monsters, a Mob-run catering business that's muscling out the little guys. He juggles several girlfriends, including a secretary in his hometown, a sweet but confused literature student who is having an affair with a professor, and a New Haven high-school girl who works with him in the student cafeteria. The hometown girl turns up pregnant but lets Danny off the hook by getting engaged to an ex-boyfriend. Danny never has a cathartic moment or even learns much from his experiences, so it's hard to describe this as a coming-of-age novel. But it's fast-paced, funny, and provides valuable insights into an era that somehow seems more than a single generation past.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)