Joe College: A Novel
by Tom Perrotta
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tom PerrottaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-09-19
ISBN: 0312361785
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Book Reviews of Joe College: A Novel
Book Review: Moving on up . .
Summary: 5 Stars
I finished Joe College last night. I enjoyed this funny book and could relate to Danny quite a bit - although I didn't go to Yale I went to college at about the same time as the people in the book so there was a narcissistic apsect to my enjoyment of this book.
I see two themes in this book. One is that even though in Untied States we don't think of ourselves as stratified into classes we are, of course, stratified into classes. Danny is moving up. it seems. His dad is a lunch truck operator in New Jersey and he is going to Yale. He has two girlfriends (well three) who are all on the move as well. Cindy, I think, sees Danny as a way up and out, and ultimately chooses a different route. His other girlfriend, Polly, is also on the move so to speak.
Ironically a couple of Danny's close friends at Yale come from much higher social class but strive to appear from a lower class, or to be heading toward a lower class; but we assume they will outgrow that concept!
The second theme of the book, it appears, is that Danny is pretty lucky. He seems to get himself into and out of a few tight situations without much consequence!
Summary of Joe College: A Novel
Populated by a vividly drawn cast of characters -- Yale students and lunch truck drivers alike -- JOE COLLEGE evokes two radically different worlds through Tom Perrotta's distinctive combination of humor, sweetness, and telling detail. JOE COLLEGE is a serious comic novel about love, higher education, and food service, a uniquely American story about the mistakes we sometimes make and the illusions we have to shed on the way to finding our place in the world.
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
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