Rating: 
Summary: A fun read with a deeper meaning, if you want it.
Review: This was the first book by Perrotta I a have read. He is an outstanding author with great ideas, a wonderful sense of humor, a great story line, sublime characters, and a wonderful writing style that truly engages the reader.Tom Perrotta's novel takes us down a road many of us have been. Middle class kids "moving up" in our younger and more innocent and naive times to the "higher echelons" of learning and interplay with completely new types of people; where the high school heirarchy simply no longer applies. It is learning and growing that does. Perrotta's first person narrative handles the task with ease that cannot help but put a smile on the readers face. The story line reminded me a bit of "Inside, Outside" by Herman Wouk, sans the religious implications and multiplying the socio and economic aspects. This is a very very good book indeed and should be receiving a lot more attention by readers everywhere. You needn't have grown up in NJ to enjoy his writing anymore than you needed to to enjoy Roth's but it sure will add to your pleasure and howling glee if you did! Buy, read, enjoy and spread the word. This guy is that good.
Rating:
Summary: engaging, but flawed, college student avoids dilemmas
Review: Quirky, engaging and, at times, enraging, Tom Perrotta's "Joe College" introduces the reader to a collegiate archtype and explores his responses to the knotty, messy problems he creates for himself and he confronts as an outsider at Yale. Redolent with the difficulties of a working-class young man assimilating into, becoming part of, and rebelling against the enormous privileges an Ivy-League education, the novel's protagonist, Danny, emerges as a friendly, but ultimately shallow and disappointing young man. The son of proud, but undereducated working-class parents (Danny's father has recently begun his own lunch-truck business, the "Roach Coach"), Danny alternately masks his intelligence, exploits it to his advantage, and seemingly has an excuse for any action that implicates him in the real world. Therein lie the frustrations of this remarkably well-written and fast-paced novel. Just at the time Danny seems to be hitting his stride at Yale, having overcome the initial culture shock and academic anxieties, he must come to grips with both a romantic complication and the need to shoulder his father's economic burdens. In both instances, he proves himself capable of both moral thought and resolute action; he also shows himself incapable of follow-through. This moral lassitude condemns Danny to the ranks of second-rate individuals. Indeed, the two people he directly involves in his moral conundrums emerge as more admirable people, yet Perrotta has made them secondary to his protagonist. In a moving epiphany, Danny seems to have gathered sufficient moral courage to commit himself to his New Jersey girlfriend, Cindy, whom he has impregnated. Faced with the possibility of leaving Yale, Danny resolves to become an adult. "I can do this, I thought. I didn't have to be Joe College...I could just be myself, my father's son, living out my life in the town where I was born...I could accept the world I'd unknowingly volunteered for the night I started a new life in Cindy, learn to be content..." How refreshingly different "Joe College" would have been had the author chosen to permit Danny to live up to his responsibilities. Instead, Perrotta permits Danny to return to his beloved and beer-bathed Yale, where Danny has come to enjoy the life of academic frivolity, arcane arguements, frustrated sexuality and general dorm idiocy. Readers from less than affluent circumstances will not be enamored with Danny's problems at Yale; even more frustrating is how conveniently he seems to slip through the cracks of accountablity and how easily even his ventures into moral respectability dissolve, awash in a laissez faire attitude. Even a courageous confrontation with a group of thugs (the Lunch Monsters, a mob front bent on monopolizing the lunch trade) is but a one-afternoon stand, sound and fury signifying nothing. Thus, despite the enormously entertaining descriptions of early '80s life in Yale and the painstaking accurate descriptions of the different world of the Yalies and the "townies," Perrotta's novel lacks the very ingredient which eluded its intent: integrity. Danny symbolically represents the flaws of the novel, its delicious froth but insubstantial core. Read "Joe College" for its atmosphere; little else emerges.
Rating:
Summary: Not exactly profund, but a hilarious read
Review: I enjoyed the film version of election and decided to check
out a couple of Mr. Perrotta's books. The Wishbones had some
terrific moments, but was not, in my humble opinion, a great work. It was a fun read. Joe College has more depth and nuance
to it. It nicely a evokes a time, 1982, almost 20 years gone as of this writing. Several critics have mentioned that not much seems to happen to our hero, Danny. I would agree on the surface--and even the end seems a bit unispired at first. But as I look back, I see Perrotta does a fine job capturing feelings of a time. That junior year of college. Those relationships (albeit we all had different circumstances, but parts of them and the feelings ring true). He takes those in a fascinating commentary (again, not that deep, but still interesting) about
class issues, finding yourself, and ultimately, learning to face life. This issue isn't that Danny doesn't seem to learn from his mistakes--he is 20. He is learning by doing and he tells us his tale because he has learned, he has accepted somethings, and grown. While it is not profound, it is consistently entertaining.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Perrotta's best
Review: I finished reading Joe College and let me tell you, this is another winner from Tom Perrotta. This is the same guy who wrote Election (made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick), and The Wishbones. To be honest, it wasn't as funny as The Wishbones - a novel that just had me bursting out laughing anywhere I picked it up for a read. It wasn't as intelligent as Election - Election was just a genius piece of satire. But this was still good, fun reading. It's a snapshot of college life and all guilt that comes with the person you are changing into during these years of your life. I'm not sure I can explain that well enough, and will just hope that some of you will know what I mean. The guilt that you feel over your parents paying, the guilt that comes with drifting away from friends that are less fortunate, the guilt of a messy room, old boyfriends. I'm sad that I've read all I can by this man. I'm going to keep looking for that short story collection of his and just hope he's got a book coming out sooner than later.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Review: The thing that caught my eye about this book at first was the cover--and then when I read about the content inside, I was intrigued. By the time I read the book, I was immersed. I love coming-of-age stories, and I was not disappointed by this one. The book kept my attention, and I loved reading about all Danny's mishaps--from the Lunch Monsters to his pregnant girlfriend to his father and mother, who were great characters. I got a sense that the author had been through some of the experiences himself, which made it all the more readable. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who has been in college or knows someone in college or of college-age. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and was sad to see it end!
Rating:
Summary: Not Perrotta's best, but still entertaining enough.
Review: Well, Joe College didn't have the scope, originality, or heartfelt delivery of Bad Haircut, was not as witty and darkly funny as Election, and wasn't as enjoyable and funny as The Wishbones, but it wasn't all bad either. If you like Perrotta's other work for the joy of the storytelling and nothing more than Joe College will be an easy, enjoyable read. If you want something along the lines of Bad Haircut or Election then re-read those because Joe College isn't breaking any new ground. Joe College is a humorous look at the college experience through the eyes of an everyman narrator from middle-class New Jersey attending Yale and trying to hold down a budding academic career and a burgeoning sex life. The mentions of Jodie Foster (being as the story is set in the early 80s), Taxi Driver, and the Regan assassination attempt seem to be used more for window dressing - setting the story in an identifiable historical period instead of making some kind of statement. Danny, while presented with trials and pressures throughout the book, constantly escapes potential entanglements (fatherhood, physical annihalation) and all for what? In the end nothing much, he is still in a situation that may bring bodily harm and constant retribution to him. For all his experience, intelligence and education Danny doesn't seem to learn that much through the course of the novel, and maybe that is precisely the point, although I personally expect a little more than Mr. Perrotta than 300 pages of storytelling to end up back where we started.
Rating:
Summary: This One Will Take You Back
Review: Tom Perrotta's Joe College is an enjoyable ride back to the 80s and back to college life. There is nothing deep or earth shattering about this novel, it's just an enjoyable, amusing look at a particular time and place. I personally derived much enjoyment out of this one because I kind of lived that life--leaving New Jersey at age 18 to go out of state to college and returning on breaks to work in the food service industry. Perrotta does an excellent job of capturing that time with a very amusing tale. The "Joe" of Joe College is Danny, a bright young man who goes to Yale and while at home, helps his dad out driving the Roach Coach, a coffee/lunch break on wheels for local office and industrial parks. Over the summer, Danny got together with a woman he went to high school with who stayed in New Jersey. Perrotta wonderfully highlights the tensions between Danny's two worlds and how he deals with them. He's got issues at school and issues at home, all believable, and Danny deals with them probably the way most 21 year olds would. Joe College is a believable and very enjoyable look at life in college and life in New Jersey in the early 80s, sometimes very funny and always amusing.
Rating: 
Summary: Having this much fun should get you expelled
Review: "Joe College" is my first pass at Tom Perrotta's writing, and I can guarantee that I'll be going back and reading his earlier works. This account of Danny, a working class college student at Yale in the early eighties is both poignant and funny. Perrotta is a brilliant wordsmith, and absorbing character descriptions, situation and anecdotes fly off the page in sequences that are often laugh-out-loud funny. But for all the humor, his tale of Danny's efforts to integrate these two disparate parts of his life - the scholarly world of privilege at Yale, and helping his father out with the lunch truck in suburban New Jersey - is often extremely affecting. Danny's half-hearted romance with home-town-girl Cindy is especially moving, and if Danny does not always conduct himself admirably, he does behave in ways that seem utterly understandable. My only reservation about "Joe College," and this seems pretty minor in light of its many successes, is that while the novel is big on plot, it is a little slight on narrative. We get lots of scenes of Joe with his college friends, at work in the dining hall, working in his dad's lunch truck, working at the dining hall at school. We see his pathetic romance with Cindy and his more hopeful one with Polly. Oh, yeah - then there is the whole Mafia subplot, which didn't quite work for me. All these different threads come fast and furious, but they never really build toward anything definitive, and the novel doesn't conclude so much as it just sort of ends. Lots of contemporary comic novels suffer because the writer is so busy creating characters and wacky situation that he forgets to emphasize plot as strongly as he might. But "Joe College" is so good that this complaint is more than an afterthought (and not enough to make me dock the book a star). I loved reading every page of it.
Rating:
Summary: I absolutely loved this book!
Review: I have been a Tom Perotta fan since first reading his s. story "Bad Haircut." His work is comical yet endearing and my god was Joe College ever a page turner. I had it on spring break w/ me and I couldn't put it down as I developed a love/hate relationship w/ it's protagonist, Danny, a Yale junior in the 1980s. At times I was so infuratiated with Danny, I began complaining about his behavior to my friends, as if I were one of the girls he is playing. I also became frustrated because I knew Danny wasn't truly a bad guy- he just acted like one. In numerous instances he would be thinking things in his head and be well-intentioned but then instead of following through, he would simply hurt the people who cared about him, like Cindy, the girlfriend back home. Yet somehow despite all the disasters Danny lets/gets himself into, things always turn out alright for him and I found myself both happy and disgusted. I think what makes this such a good book is that it did evoke such powerful feelings from me. I highly recommend it for college students and people in the real world alike.
Rating:
Summary: Pales Next to Election
Review: After seeing the sharply witty movie, "Election", I had to read the book it was based on, by Tom Perotta. I loved it. So when I discovered he had just come out with a new book, I snatched it up and was incredibly dissapointed. Whereas the characters in Election, even some of the more farfetched ones, remind me of people in my high school, the characters in Joe College didn't seem quite as real. Perhaps I'm too young to enjoy it, considering I wasn't even alive in 1982, but I still found the book fairly dull, only worth a read for a few amusing moments.
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