I haven’t read everything by Tom Perrotta yet, but I’ve read enough to consider him one of my favorite American authors. It all started when I read Election after really enjoying the Alexander Payne movie adaptation (one of the only times I watched the movie before reading the book). I was taken with Perrotta’s fun ability to tear apart the American suburb and shed light on its dark underbelly, all the while maintaining a pretty fabulous sense of humor. I quickly followed that reading experience by devouring Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher, both of which I loved. A few years ago I picked up The Leftovers and really enjoyed it (I never watched the show, because it looks so bleak, and the novel was dark but still featured Perrotta’s penchant for mixing darkness and the funny). I still have four of his books left to read, but I did just finish his first ever publication called Bad Haircut, somewhat in between a collection of short stories and a novel, as all the stories are set in the same town and center on a single character, a young boy named Buddy, following him from childhood through adolescence in 1970s New Jersey.
Tom Perrotta
The stories are a mixed bag of suburban 70s Americana. Buddy’s life is traced through a series of vignettes which in and of themselves don’t amount to a whole lot, but together they form snapshots of a traditional American tapestry: inconsequential but somewhat moving, a life lived benefitting from middle class status in a suburban hamlet, where small events amount to momentous moments in a young man’s life. Eventually Perrotta would become a whole lot smarter and, frankly, better at writing, but there are elements here that already show his strengths, especially his particular brand of humor. Something that surprised me, though, was how poorly the female characters in this book were. It’s weird because in the books I’ve read that is a particular strong suit of the author, so to read a work that paints women as broad archetypes, absent of much agency or personality, and just foils against whom Buddy can measure himself, was very disappointing. Also disappointing and tone-deaf (I do get that it was published in the 90s and written about the 70s) was the discussion of black people in a particular story unfortunately titled “Race Riot”. Besides the gratuitous usage of a particular word, the entire story was supposedly this grand internal awakening for the white protagonist, but he doesn’t learn any lesson and the story may be the least successful in the whole bunch.
There are some very good stories and overall I very much enjoyed reading this collection, it’s a solid first effort by an author I do love a lot and whose works I enjoy reading. I already have The Wishbones, Joe College, Nine Inches, and Mrs. Fletcher on my shelf – I just have to get around to reading them, and I will. I just don’t know exactly when.
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