Rating: 
Summary: Change your plans for this evening
Review: Joe College is thoroughly enjoyable and brilliantly written. Tom Perrotta is one of those natural writers who make everything effortless and convincing. He is thoughtful, funny, moving and so much fun to read that I guarantee you'll change your plans for the evening so you can finish this book. The setting is the early 1980's, and the protaganist is a kid from suburban New Jersey who goes to Yale (just as Perrotta did). Anyone would enjoy this novel, and if you went to college during this time the pleasure is even greater. All of Perrotta's books are fantastic--especially The Wishbones, and also Bad Haircut and Election.
Rating: 
Summary: a major disappointment
Review: I read this after reading Perotta's wonderful "Little Children." His humor, his insights, his sharp observations, his affection for his characters - all are there. What is not there is a sense of structure, a center of gravity, a consistent viewpoint or any movement toward character development. These flaws point up how much the author learned in the three years between novels, but his sensibility in this book lies uncomfortably close to grad school moral righteousness and self-congratulation. The main character is rarely very funny and his friends are interchangeable. In some instances, the minor characters are more strongly drawn than the major ones. But keep watching this guy - he may just take the right risks someday.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling Coming-of-Age Tale
Review: The title of this novel would lead one to believe that it's about the life of a student in college, but that's not exactly the case. Sure, part of it takes place at college, but in truth it's more of a coming-of-age story; a young man's attempt to reconcile his working class, suburban upbringing with the wealth and intellectual glamour he discovers at prestigious Yale University. It's a well-told and compelling tale, and, like other Perrotta novels, leaves one with something to think about at its end.
We meet Danny in his junior year as he is finally coming into his own. He's established himself intellectually, he's got new and interesting friends, and he's even a bit of a celebrity in that he's an integral part of a newly-minted literary magazine. It's now been more than two years since he came to school and his home-town ties are slowly disintegrating. But some are more difficult to abandon than others.
His father, for one, owns a lunch truck, or roach coach. In a mid-life change of careers, he's decided to become his own man, to run his own business. But it is stressful work, and damaging to his health. Danny finds that he must spend all his vacation time helping him. Then there is the girl Danny met from his old high school. She's a secretary now, at a run-of-the-mill, small industrial plant. He goes out with her knowing full well that the relationship will never blossom into anything. He is aware he is using her.
Although Danny is doing well, grade-wise, he is painfully aware of all of the shenanigans going on around him, some of which he participates in. A girl has basically moved into his suite with one of his roommates. Other roommates smoke dope. Another spends his time in fascination with assassins of American presidents. Everybody drinks way, way too much. One evening, while cavorting with a female on the campus grounds, he is ridiculed by a student-actor dressed as the "fool" from Shakespeare's King Lear. Is this why our parents spend thousands and thousands of dollars a year? He thinks.
With his background, he is able to view these goings-on through the eyes of the average working-stiff American, and without ever explicitly saying why, finds that he is ashamed. His actions, sometimes reckless, sometimes foolish, seem to indicate a subconscious desire to be punished. This conflict is unresolved by novel's end.
It is unlikely that this novel will ever win a Pulitzer Prize, or even be nominated for one. There is no huge encompassing theme, there are no substantial truths revealed, there is no scathing indictment of society. None of that. It is, however, a tautly told, bright, compelling narrative with characters one would expect to meet in real life.
It is, frankly, the type of thing which present-day aspiring authors should strive for. The average reader is not interested in being dazzled by an author's research or bombarded with symbolic references to Freud, he is interested in being told a good story. If an author does this well enough and often enough, all of those other elements--the ones which make a novel great--will fall into place. Indeed, they did so in Mr. Perrotta's most recent effort, the excellent Little Children. Joe College works because, at the very least, it is a fine example of the art of storytelling.
Rating:
Summary: a major disappointment
Review: I read this after reading Perotta's wonderful "Little Children." His humor, his insights, his sharp observations, his affection for his characters - all are there. What is not there is a sense of structure, a center of gravity, a consistent viewpoint or any movement toward character development. These flaws point up how much the author learned in the three years between novels, but his sensibility in this book lies uncomfortably close to grad school moral righteousness and self-congratulation. The main character is rarely very funny and his friends are interchangeable. In some instances, the minor characters are more strongly drawn than the major ones. But keep watching this guy - he may just take the right risks someday.
Rating:
Summary: Scarily close to "real" life...
Review: I am from central NJ and am also a junior at Yale. I loved reading this book because I could relate to the descriptions of Danny's life both at school and at home. In fact, many of the scenarios in the novel are eerily similar to ones that I have experienced. Perrotta gets an A+ for verisimilitude. Neither Yale nor Jersey has changed all that much in overall character between 1982 and 2002 - at least not so much that the basic elements of class conflict described in the book would be outdated. Perrotta captures well the struggles facing anyone who goes from life in blue-collar suburbia to life in the hallowed halls of an Ivy League university.
Rating:
Summary: Will you bring you back to your college days
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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