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Summary: Will you bring you back to your college days
Review: Great, funny, entertaining, quick book. Loved it so much I sent a copy to my old college roommate.
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Summary: You Can Almost Smell the '80's!
Review: Joe College is a novel about a guy from Jersey who is a student at Yale in the early '80's. Just from the scenario you know the potential for humor and class conflict is great--and Tom Perrotta (author of Election) doesn't disappoint.This is a very funny story, made all the funnier for its grounding in reality. While Joe College is not strictly an autobiographical novel, it is worth noting that Perrotta was himself a student at Yale who graduated in the early '80's. IT shows in his writing. The setting is very realistically portrayed--you can almost smell the '80's, with its leather bomber jackets and Reaganite overtones. You find yourself really pulling for Danny as he struggles with Middlemarch and his overpriveleged classmates while still dealing with his world back home, including his father's lunch truck business being overrun by mafioso types, and a big-haired high-hoped girlfriend with only a high school education. I chuckled a lot while reading this book, but also recognized myself in it. I highly recommend it.
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Summary: ah memories
Review: I thought Joe College was a very entertaining read. It kept me interested the entire way through; and even though I didn't really like the characters or agree with their actions, I still felt close to them. Tom Perotta fleshed out the characters to the point that I felt that I knew them. His depiction of Yale life ranges from dead-on to highly exagerated, but whether or not it is accurate, it is still fun to read.
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Summary: Funny stuff
Review: A funny, interesting tale of the college life at Yale. For me, a high school student, it is nice to read a light-hearted, "real life" description of what college is like, as opposed to everything one hears from teachers, parents, etc. It made me want to be in Matt's (the protagonist's) shoes..except, of course, for smoking pot and eating kimchi. :)
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Summary: "Where have you gone Holden Caulfield ?"
Review: Tom Perrotta's "Joe College" depicts dorm living, cafeteria dining, townie problems and summer job doldrums that surround college life about as honestly as any writer who dared to reveal those experiences to unwitting parents. "Joe College" lives where it happens for the 18-22 year olds today. "Joe College" is the moniker many a male student has been dubbed with during spring breaks and summer vacations working at jobs that pay for books and pocket money by those guys we all know. Perrotta's novel is a humorous and fun to read memoir of one Joe College's experiences at New Haven's Ivy League campus and behind the wheel of his dad's lunch wagon during breaks. Behind the humor and tongue-in cheek criticism of post secondary education, "Joe College" offers a glimpse into the myriad of issues faced by college students living away from home for the first time. There are the social circles to avoid, parties to attend, high school sweethearts left behind, alcohol and drug issues, relationship and commitment issues and somewhere there are the academic reasons for attending college lurking in the shadows. Perrotta guides the main character Danny, aka Joe College, through situation after situation, sometimes humbled, other times confused. I enjoyed this book immensely. While it conjured up certain memories better forgotten, it reminded me of a time in life when the day's issues seemed so important, people seemed so energetic and friendships were built so strong that they would last for a lifetime. Buy a copy of Perrotta's novel and then call your old roommate.
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Summary: Danny's Inferno
Review: Tom Perrotta is chronicler of man's troubles akin to a watered-down and American Nick Hornby, and a dialogist with the potential to be as good as Richard Russo. He isn't nearly as good as either of these two fine writers. But that's almost an unfair comparison. Perrotta is good, and despite the fact that "Joe College" is a problematic and flawed book, it's still a pretty gripping and fun read. Danny is a junior at Yale University, majoring in English and minoring in keeping his awkward social life straight. Spring break is spent manning the lunch truck while his downtrodden father recovers from surgery, staying out of the way of racketeering group of rival lunch truckers, and avoiding Cindy, an ex-girlfriend who doesn't measure up to his highbrow standards. This would all be pretty banal stuff, except for the fact that Danny is a narrator several years removed from these events. Perrotta only sporadically gives us clues to this fact, unfortunately, but when he does it gives the story that much more power. It becomes, then, the story of an older man looking back with new perspective on his bygone days of innocence. And it is this new perspective that Danny sorely needs. He's smart enough to know when he's doing/done wrong, but only with the benefit of hindsight. One revelation has him reasoning why he hooked up with Cindy in the first place. He notes early on that their first kiss prompted this internal monologue: "My first thought was, This is amazing! My second was, She's a secretary!... it made me pull away in confusion." But later he explains that their relationship existed only because he was "trying to find a little company so [he] wouldn't have to spend [his] nights listening to Judas Priest and watching [porno] movies." If only he could have had this ignoble conclusion while it was happening, he might have saved himself and Cindy a whole lot of anguish. As the narrator, Danny seems to understand this. At times he appears to be hiding something, whether it's behind a clever joke (of which there are many) or even using a flashback to dig deeper still into his past, the purpose of which is to explain (or cloud) his motivations. On top of this, we never learn his last name. There are several opportunities where it could come out, but Danny stops himself short. Which leads me to believe that he isn't really telling us the whole story. There's obviously something more embarrassing to hear than what we get. Danny is an unreliable narrator, that most-effective of post-modern rhetorical techniques. The irony then is that he, an English major at the height of the post-modern movement, doesn't even realize this. It's a neat trick that Perrotta tries to pull off, but it ultimately falls short. Okay, now that I've got all that po-mo lit talk out of the way, let me quickly talk about why this book is so much fun. Perrotta is a no-muss no-fuss writer. His spare, matter-of-fact prose is very inviting, ably masking bigger themes. Also, he's very credible in the way he portrays the way these twentysomethings communicate with each other. A letter Cindy writes to Danny is just so spot-on and so hilarious in the way it perfectly captures the tone of someone with much passion, much to say, but little talent for actually saying (or writing) it. Her overuse of capitalization, exclamation marks, and tangential thoughts remind me a lot of many a letter I received (and, yes I'll admit it, wrote) in my salad days. Perrotta populates his story with a multitude of characters (I'd say too many at times), each bouncing off Danny for moments, and then disappearing into the background. My favourite of these is Matt, a co-worker of Danny's whose uninhibited personality is always amusing. Perrotta also populates the story with endless references to the time period. Mentions of the Iran hostages ("I didn't learn that Americans were being held captive... until... my history TA made an offhand comment about Ted Koppel's hairdo"), Steely Dan's "Gaucho" album, the rise of Ronald Reagan, and Jodie Foster's Yale tenure (she even has a cameo in one party scene) firmly entrench the book around the turn of the 1980s. In the end, nothing really horrendous happens to Danny. "Things could be worse," he reminds himself. "I wasn't in jail, I wasn't in the hospital, and I wasn't married. My life was pretty much on track, unchanged by the obstacle course of potential disasters I'd been running for the past several days." Which nearly makes the book an empty exercies. But Danny does manage to learn from these 'disasters', or at least we're lead to believe that he does. I suspect just the act of writing his 'memoirs' (with Perrotta a more than able 'ghost-writer') proves this is true.
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Summary: Tom Perrotta is like a Jumbly Nick Hornby, but good
Review: 4 out 5 stars!
Joe College is a really funny book that keeps you interested the whole time. It's about Danny, a guy who runs his dad's "Roach Coach" lunch truck in the summers, and is a avid working student at Yale during the fall. The main flow of the story switches off between his current times in college, and his summer adventures. He get many love flames through out the story, and each one has some sort of problem that he has to encounter. Danny goes through some crazy stuff, but manages to stay sane somehow. This book is very realistic if you are a guy reading it, you can relate many girl problems and events Danny has with his friends that you have with yours. This story is more of a collections of events that happen through out Danny's life more than it is a novel, but its hilarious, and its so easy to relate to. Danny enjoys college life, and obsesses over the use of highlighters in his stories. He reminds himself nightly about how he has to finsish some book, but always says he can just finish it at breakfast. This book would be a great movie. I relate Perrotta to Hornby because I read "High Fidelity," and a little bit of "About a Boy," and the styles, situations and themes are the same. I love both of their writing styles, so i reccomend both. I reccommend this story more towards late teenaged guys, its more of a guy's view on life, and easier to associate.
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Summary: Not his best
Review: When did it become a prerequisite for male contemporary authors to pen narratives with college students as protagonists? Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, and Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets were all very unbalanced and unoriginal and detracted from their best works. Tom Perrotta's attempt is the most convincing and the least pretentious of the bunch, but it is still not up to par with his short story collection (Bad Haircuts), where for a brief moment, I thought he was Raymond Carver reincarnated. We don't need another Ivy League Bildungsroman with contemporary identity issues and rehashes This Side of Paradise, thank you very much.
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Summary: Enjoy Joe College: Not so much a novel as a series of events
Review: Perotta's _Election_ and the movie it inspired were fascinating and original. _Joe College_ is, at best, mildly entertaining. The first half of the book brings you ever deeper in the life of Danny, a confused Yale Junior. He is conflicted by the discontinuity of his life in New Haven and that of his family and friends in New Jersey. While the events are interesting, the remainder of the book does not do much to show how Danny grows or matures. Several plot lines are tied up in the conclusion, but one is left with the feeling that the book was simply a list of things that happen to Danny and that there is no underlying theme.
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Summary: You'll laugh out loud, but...
Review: This is a book I truly enjoyed. Let there be no bones about it however that Perrotta almost cheats us out of the best part of the book by wrapping things up a bit too quick at the end. Some other reviewers mention this fault as well, but two days after finishing it, I have come to realize that I feel better about the ending now. Our hero, if he can be called that, is living a life straddling two drastically different worlds, one where he wears and apron and another where he wears the gown of academia. This dichotomy is further explored in his work study job in the dining hall cleaning dishes where he is able to interact with townies and with whom is probably has as much in common as he does with his Ivy League cohort. How he manages to do this, with friends who clearly do not even see a fence, captures the optimism and work ethic of the working class and flies in the face of entitled aristocrats. Constantly torn between the two sides in his personal life, social life, and intellectual life, Danny somehow manages to get by and to some degree excels is handling the struggles he faces. In fact I'd argue that he learns one of college's most valuable lessons: How you handle your failures is more important than if you fail. He makes decisions and then comes to find that his actions are not necessary. He pauses for reflection and the author does an excellent job of including silence, tough to do in literature, to show the deliberations in his head. Danny is a character you empathize with, yet don't envy, you root for him, but still expect him to earn his just deserts. We all probably know someone like him and while he's not our best friend, he's still someone we hung out with in college. Ultimately this book achieves its goal of providing humor and self-awareness without being too didactic. I'm glad I read this book.
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