FROM THE PUBLISHER

The acclaimed author of Election and The Wishbones takes on the ultimate crucible of personal reinvention—college.

For many Ivy League college students, spring break means a raucous road trip to a spot in the sun. For Danny, a Yale junior, the spring of 1982 means two weeks behind the wheel of the "Roach Coach," his dad's lunch truck in central New Jersey. But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try and make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently-dropped bombshell to contend with. And there's also lissome Polly in New Haven—with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor. If girl problems aren't enough, there's the menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thugs who think Danny has planted the "Roach Coach" in their territory.

Populated by a vividly drawn cast of characters, Joe College is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funniest fiction yet, a comic journey into the dark side of love, higher education and food service.

FROM THE CRITICS

Newsweek

Tom Perrotta is like an American Nick Hornby: companionable and humane, lighthearted and surprisingly touching...Perrotta has established a slightly befogged comic landscape that's his alone. Fans of such quirky indie films as "Chasing Amy" and "Dazed and Confused" should feel right at home.

Publishers Weekly

HYale junior Danny is the winning narrator of Perrotta's fourth book--"winning" not just because he's smart and funny, but also because when it comes to college life, love and misbehavior, the guy always comes out on top. Conflicts in his life are neatly resolved through acts of grace or circumstance. Driving drunk on his spring break, Danny gets pulled over for a busted headlight--by a policeman who turns out to be an old high school friend. At school, the girl he likes calls him out of the blue to say she wants to sleep with him. And back home in New Jersey, his girlfriend, Cindy, pregnant with his child, makes a life-changing decision that leaves Danny free of guilt and responsibility. The resulting portrait is of a picaresque hero who's not just charming but charmed, a befuddled na f easily embracing everything life throws his way. Set in 1982, the novel is studded with references to that era's pop culture--Kansas songs on the radio; Jodie Foster sightings on campus. But the book's appeal is in its idiosyncrasies, not its name-dropping. Danny spends his spring break behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck, and must fend off the hostile Lunch Monsters, a gang of New Jersey thugs who want to steal his father's route. Story lines like that one prove that Perrotta (Election; The Wishbones) is in full control of his quirky comic sensibility, and they make it easy to root for Danny as he navigates his way from his blue-collar past to his privileged future. The novel leaves some loose ends hanging, but after things fall so neatly into place for its narrator, that comes as a relief--a reminder that art, like life, isn't perfect after all. (Sept.) FYI: Perrotta's Election was made into a film starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

No one chronicles growing up in suburban New Jersey in the late 1970s and early 1980s better than Perrotta. His short story collection Bad Haircut and first novel The Wishbones hilariously depicted the prolonged adolescence of working-class males in the Garden State. (His second novel, Election, about a high school political contest, became a terrific movie starring Matthew Broderick.) In Joe College, Perrotta moves to the campus of Yale University (although his hero still hails from New Jersey) to continue his witty exploration of young men becoming adults in spite of themselves. Narrator Danny, a Yale junior, is dreading the upcoming spring break; while his wealthier roommates have glamorous vacation plans, Danny faces 392 more grueling pages of George Eliot's Middlemarch, two weeks of driving his father's lunch truck ("the Roach Coach"), and seeing his old girlfriend Cindy, a secretary with a Charley's Angels hairdo and a not very surprising secret to tell him. Although the episodic plot has a pasted-together feel, Perrotta is a master of the light comic touch and wry social observation; his take on yellow highlighters and highlighting techniques is very, very funny ("George Eliot wrote with such sustained profundity that I found myself coloring over line after line after line, sometimes covering entire pages with a thick coat of yellow neon"). For all popular fiction collections.--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Entertainment Weekly

Revealing the inner workings of a Roach Coach is just one of the delights of JOE COLLEGE. Readers will revel in Perrotta's gift for telling detail...Hilarious...Perrotta transforms '80s nostalgia into art.

USA Today

An antic novel of academia and the middle class...Perrotta's forte is balancing the seriousness of Danny's emotional dilemma with comic barbs hurled at academic chicanery.Read all 11 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"I have a new favorite book, Joe College, and this is why: Tom Perrotta wrote it; an irresistible and accidentally heroic voice narrates it; angst has never been more delicious, food funnier, or Yale more accessible. What a great pleasure." — Elinor Lipman