Review: 'Joe College' one sweet highlight after another

"Joe College"
By Tom Perrotta
St. Martin's Press
Fiction
306 pages

In this story: Surprise, surprise Privileged vs. working-class lives RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Joshua Kuritzky
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- In an early chapter of Tom Perrotta's "Joe College" there is a two-page exploration of the highlighting habits of Yale students. As our narrator remarks, "I had seen highlighters before coming to college; I just hadn't understood what they were for." Now, of course, he is an expert highlighter, coating each page of "Middlemarch" with a patina of bright yellow, requiring the use of underlining and margin notes to distinguish the massively important passages from those of only minor importance.

This reviewer, who approaches a book with a combination of pencil and index cards, made it a point to mark this passage. Although the pages on highlighting are only of marginal (pun embarrassingly intended) importance in "Joe College" -- the latest novel by the author of "Election" -- they act as an aside to the reader, a gentle tap on the shoulder signifying that what's ahead is worthy of attention and highlighting.

Meet Danny: he's a Yale student, but not a wealthy legacy. His father drives a lunch truck (dubbed the "Roach Coach") for a living, and Danny, through a combination of effort, talent, and good fortune, has done the family proud by going to the Ivy League institution.

And in this, Danny's junior year, troubles are piling up like homework assignments-the hometown girl he dated over the summer won't stop calling him; the girl he has a crush on is dating a professor; and Danny is slowly, but noticeably, drifting apart from his friends. And if all that's not bad enough, he's got half of "Middlemarch" to finish reading (and highlighting) for a seminar.

While home for spring break, things don't get much better. Danny's old girlfriend (whose phone calls he never returned) has a surprise for him. Just as in crime movies, where a gun seen at the beginning will be fired before the end, conversations about birth control over Christmas break have a way of coming back and ruining spring break. Meanwhile, Danny helps his father, who is recovering from hemorrhoid surgery, by driving the "Roach Coach," and quickly runs afoul of the Lunch Monsters, a group of sandwich-selling pituitary cases with mob ties and a penchant for violence. One can't imagine a worse spring break.

There are times where "Joe College" feels like two novels: one about college and one about being home from college. The college section, although interesting for its tales of highlighting, parties, and reckless kimchi consumption (yes, the Korean pickled cabbage), is the weaker of the two halves -- Danny's friends never quite take shape, and it is difficult to care about academic crises that even Danny doesn't care about.

But it is when Danny is experiencing the friction between college and home, between tony and townie, that "Joe College" makes the dean's list of boy-comes-home-from-school stories, managing to be reminiscent of "Goodbye, Columbus" and "The Graduate" without ever being derivative. The lunch truck escapades, although outrageous and bordering on slapstick, are somehow more real, both to the reader and Danny, than what goes on at Yale.

If there is one theme that should be highlighted in a different color, it is that which arises from the constant clashes, both literal and symbolic, between the privileged life of the Yale student and the working-class lives of people like Danny's father and the people with whom Danny works in a cafeteria. In a passage worth highlighting twice, Danny watches his Yale friends dance to Bruce Springsteen and observes that the music "didn't sound right in this context, played for the enjoyment of people who were going to end up being the bosses of the people the Boss was singing about."

It's observations like these, from Perrotta's endearing, fallible, and confused narrator, that make up for "Joe College"'s few flaws. As Danny begins to understand himself and to see himself, child of a lunch-truck driver, in the midst of all this ivy, where the local pizzeria is filled with a "mob of ex-National Merit Scholars and former student council presidents," "Joe College" becomes more than a funny look at college life, but a tale, on a small spring break scale, of self-discovery-a novel worth approaching with highlighter in hand.

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St. Martin's Press

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