Book review: Fast-paced tale of 1970s suburbia

'Ghost Town' is a skilful novel that moves at pace, makes you feel for the characters involved, and pieces together a fascinating story

Tom Perrotta: The Roddy Doyle of the Jersey suburbs. Picture: Beowulf Sheehan

• Ghost Town
• Tom Perrotta
• Simon & Schuster, €25.00

Before you open any book by Tom Perrotta, you are confronted by all the pithy descriptions foisted upon him by critics and fans over the years. 

He’s the Dickens of New Jersey, the Steinbeck of the put-upon suburbs, a literary version of so many Springsteen songs made flesh. 

All of those rather grandiose comparisons ring somewhat true. 

He produces compelling, eminently readable and note perfect portraits of modern American life, whether navigating the politics of high school in Election, addressing religious fundamentalism in The Leftovers, or imposter syndrome in Joe College.

The first of those was made into a seminal movie starring Reese Witherspoon as Tracey Flick and the second provided fecund raw material for one of the most underrated HBO TV series. 

Hollywood loves Perrotta and with good reason. His work hops off the page as instantly filmable, is usually smartly plotted, and he possesses a deft, light touch when taking readers into a world of his making.

In Ghost Town, we are in Creamwood, a blue-collar Jersey town in the summer of 1974 where 13-year-old Jimmy Perrini is trying to come to terms with the loss of his mother to cancer amid his own maturation struggles. 

The sudden fracturing of what used to be a “normal” family casts the unfortunate adolescent adrift. 

His father has been broken by the loss; his older sister is off doing her own thing and, left to his own devices, unmoored Jimmy embarks on his own journey of discovery and misadventure involving various characters around the neighbourhood. 

En route there are nods to the racism endemic in that era and the lingering, divisive rancour about the Vietnam War.

Obviously mining the cultural seam of his own formative years in Jersey, Perrotta is a great man for the small detail that brings authenticity to the narrative. 

When Jimmy and his love interest Olivia dabble with an Ouija board in an attempt to contact the other side, it reeks of the seventies and eighties. 

In those decades, kids seemed to spend a lot more time talking, obsessing and worrying about such supernatural devices and general occult malarkey in a way that no longer appears part of the teen experience. 

Maybe we were all just weirder then.

Aside from Jimmy’s escapades in pursuit of romance and his hanging around with older lads driving cars too fast and getting him to smoke weed, there is another plot device afoot. 

In the present day, his adult self, now a successful writer returns to the town to speak and to honour his father after whom a public building is to be named. 

The novelist returning to his or her hometown after a lengthy, significant absence is an old literary trope, but Perrotta uses it to smart effect as a framing device.

Decades after that summer of so much upheaval that changed the course of his life forever, the elder Perrini is confronting ghosts the same way his younger self used to encounter them in what turned out to be his last frenetic months in his home place.

Aside from his own baggage, he’s also dealing with the town’s memory of his father the hero being at odds with his own.

Literary snobs often complain Perrotta’s novels are too light. 

Of course, they miss the point entirely, underestimating the immense skill required to produce something like Ghost Town that moves at pace, makes you feel for the characters involved, and pieces together a fascinating story. 

Roddy Doyle baffles some of the more pompous critics in a similar way. Perrotta might just be the Doyle of the Jersey suburbs. New blurb material already.

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