Perrotta returns to Yale, in book and in person

Yale's most ordinary novelist graduate dresses in jeans and wears black glasses, with clean-cropped, red-brown hair. As much as he looks like a Danny (the name of Joe College's narrator), he is actually a Tom; it's likely, however, that were Danny to write his own semi-autobiographical novel, his narrator would be named Tom. And he certainly would be from New Jersey.

ALY SUDOW/YH Tom Perrotta, JE '83, and (below) a scene from 'Election,' the feature film based on his book.

Tom Perrotta, JE '83, writes about ordinary people, but not in the sense of a weepy Robert Redford film; his are not ordinary characters facing great loss, but normal New Jerseyans facing the loss of a high school election, of virginity, of the '70s. As nasty as the film Election was, his novel from which it was adapted ends with Tracey Flick and Mr. McAllister reconciling and moving on. So while Joe College revolves around the shock of Danny's assimilation into an Ivy League dorm room from a working class Garden State background, the real forces of darkness are the Whiffenpoofs, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and the JE Dining Hall. As Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, said before a Calhoun Master's Tea this week, "Tom did for the JE dining hall what Dostoyevsky did for St. Petersburg." And he did for the Whiffenpoofs what the Whiffenpoofs do for the Whiffenpoofs.

Ordinary as these topics might sound, especially to his fellow Yalies, Perrotta's style is anything but normal when compared to that of the novelists of his generation. He spoke about this in an interview we conducted in the most ordinary fashion possible—electronically: "My literary generation seems to have been defined by a group of virtuoso postmodernists in the David Foster Wallace school. I feel less affinity with those writers than I do with the realists of the previous generation—Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford." In the case of Joe College, this realism is Yale's. Take, for instance the novel's first dialogue:

"'What do you think?' he asked. `We gonna need more than two kegs?'

'Depends, I guess. How many people are coming?'

'A lot...'

'I'm just gonna plaster the campus with signs that say, "Party at Matt's." As far as I'm concerned, the whole school's invited, plus all of Jessica's friends from Columbia. I wouldn't be surprised if a couple hundred people show up.'"

Now put the Herald down on the dining hall table for a few moments: if you listen hard enough, you might hear an echo (as long as you substitute "Harvard" for "Columbia" and "Shira's" for "Matt's").

COURTESY PARAMOUNT PICTURES

The challenge for Perrotta, he says, is "not to break new ground, but to find fresh ways to approach familiar subjects." Instead of the high-wire acts of Wallace, Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers (slightly younger than he is) or Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon (slightly older), Perrotta writes compact, punchy novels that pick a single situation and try to explore it from all sides. "How neat it would be, I thought, if I could make you care about such a meaningless thing as a high school presidential election," he said to a large audience at the tea.

His prose's compactness and "overt normalcy" (a term he has used to desribe his work) functions to this end—to make people care. This is his earnest desire, one which persistently came through in his responses over the course of the interview and Master's Tea. "Mainly," he tells me, "I'm committed to making fiction out of `ordinary' experience and to telling stories in a way that will make them accessible to a large audience. Partly this is an aesthetic and even political position—I've always been attracted to the novel as a popular and democratic literary form—but it's also just a matter of who I am."

This is not such an easy matter to resolve—who is he, exactly? Was he born to run like his Boss fans from Jersey, or born to be a boss himself, like the other kids in entryway C? This conflict, though resolved in his writing, persists in his life. "Anyone who goes to a college like Yale is a member of an elite, whether they like it or not," he says. "It's certainly something I've had to grapple with at various points in my life."

Now, however, the question is not between working class hero and scholar, but between novelist and screenwriter. He stopped teaching a couple of years ago (he taught writing at Harvard—but will root for Yale on Saturday), and makes a living by selling screenplays. Since Joe College, in fact, he has postponed his novel writing indefinitely. His rags-to-Yale-to-riches story has a new chapter, though, as he has a couple of television pilots in development. One is an adaption of Bad Haircut, his collection of short stories about growing up in New Jersey in the '70s. The other? "It's about a working class family that wins the lottery." Danny couldn't have written it any better.

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