Tom Perrotta Elects To Place 'Joe College' In '80s Yale
By by KAREN CHAU, Staff Writer
I hated the 1999 movie "Election," starring Reese Witherspoon and based on the novel by Tom Perrotta. It just thoroughly annoyed me that someone who was completely ignorant of her own degree of worthlessness could go on to succeed in life-the assumed fate of Witherspoon's character.

This frustration was of course the reason I read Perrotta's next and most recent book, "Joe College." At least I would be able to see if he continued to churn out deeply disturbing affirmations of my sneaking suspicion that the world isn't always fair.

Surprisingly, the world does turn out to be a fair place for Danny, the working-class junior at Yale who is the protagonist of "Joe College." Perrotta has created an engaging narrator who clearly articulates his internal conflicts and relates whimsical anecdotes at the least provocation. While his impulses and actions are generally based on good intentions, he also is capable of being a complete asshole, as one of his suitemates constantly points out.

Danny's conflicts often stem from his navigation of the world from which he "escaped" and the privileged one in which he finds himself. By his junior year, Danny has finally found his place at Yale among several groups: his well-characterized suitemates, his fellow cafeteria workers and a new literary magazine which focuses on "the whole wide hardscrabble world spread out like a dirty rug at the foot of our ivory tower" and is printed on the best quality paper stock with high-quality photo reproduction through the funding of an "anonymous" rich uncle donor of the magazine's founder.

The story has a promising enough start, with the introduction of several premises that are interesting enough to hold one's attention. Danny has a sticky situation left over from home with a girl for whom the word "fling" has no meaning, at least with regard to him. He has a crush on a fellow Yalie editor, who is dating a 32-year-old assistant professor fresh out of Berkeley and who also happens to be one of Danny's favorite teachers.

And most important, he has to deal with spring break when he returns home to New Jersey to drive his father's lunch truck, named "Dante's Roach Coach." His lunch route is being threatened by the belligerent son of Mr. Vito "Meatballs" Salome, a boy who is used to having his own way with the help of physical force in the form of three other somewhat thuggish punks with the "overcooked, slightly radioactive complexion you could only acquire at a tanning salon."

By the novel's end, all these situations have been tidied up and worked out, but without the same degree of realism with which the story opened. Things work out beautifully-a little too much so-for everyone involved, and Danny's life goes on. He even gets to have sex with a beautiful, probably underage fellow cafeteria worker within the last five pages of the book.

However, the main strength of this book is in the writing. Although it is set in 1982, many of Perrotta's observations and comments ring true in today's world. At times he does overdo the pop culture references to the point where you want to pat him on the head and tell him you know he is hip.

Yet Perrotta mostly manages to keep the tone clever without being snidely referential. At times I was laughing so frequently I drove three people to change their seats in the Science Library.

Perhaps my amusement partly resulted from the fact that Yale, even in the early '80s, sounds very similar to Amherst. Danny "appreciate[s] the mix-and-match, all-you-can-eat spirit of the dining hall," highlights his texts using a "Byzantine system involving highlighter, underlines, and marginal punctuation marks" and is utterly perplexed by the aura of the male a cappella group, the Whiffenpoofs: "The way [he] saw it, no amount of sex or travel would compensate for the humiliation of belonging to a group with such a stupid name-it would have been only marginally more embarrassing to claim membership in 'The Shitheads' or 'The Dingleberries.'"

It also helps that you can't help liking Danny, even though he is cowardly with regards to his responsibilities because he is so desperate to stay at Yale and to take advantage of all the opportunities it represents.

While Perrotta ultimately allows things to work out for his protagonist, through a few plot convolutions that hurry by in the final pages, "Joe College"'s considerable charm is in its details and anecdotes and Danny's inner thoughts, which reflect Perrotta's own thoughtful observation and sense of the ridiculousness inherent in collegiate life.

Issue 07, Submitted 2000-10-25 00:23:33