Joe College
Having pennedElection, a great novel of high-school  manners, Tom Perrotta gives usJoe 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."Electionmay  have a better plot, butJoe Collegescoots along like a  waterskeeter on a marvelous stream of consciousness. Tom Perrotta was  born to write.--Tim Appelo