GHOST TOWN, by Tom Perrotta
Upon finishing Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “Ghost Town,” I found myself agreeably haunted by the corpulent specter of Harold Bloom: the late, great literary critic who called the Harry Potter books “rubbish only good for the dustbin where they will certainly wind up in a generation or so,” and Stephen King “immensely inadequate” and “a writer of penny dreadfuls.”
In “Ghost Town,” a successful author named Jay Perry, a minor-league version of the successful author Perrotta, is fretting about his legacy. He has suffered from a crude version of what Bloom called “the anxiety of influence,” maybe even with regard to … Stephen King.
A graduate of Princeton and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (as Perrotta is of Yale and Syracuse), Perry had a 15-year run as a “literary writer,” with diminishing returns. His oeuvre includes a short-story collection featuring a Pennywise-like clown who dies during a kindergartner’s birthday party while one dad is making out with a mom ghost.
Perry promised his wife that his next book would be commercial, and pounded out a supernatural noir called “Ghost Teacher.” His agent persuaded him to make the teacher a “guiding spirit” for underdog students, and a successful young-adult series and animated TV show were born.
But Perry, now a financially secure empty nester with an infinity pool in the Hollywood Hills — if not quite the clout of Perrotta, whose sexy screen adaptations include “Election,” “Little Children” and “The Leftovers” (reviewed by King in the Times Book Review) — has grown melancholy and reflective. What story does he have left to tell?
Glancingly confronting themes of artistic integrity and abandonment, including self-abandonment, and unfolding mostly in flashbacks to the early 1970s, “Ghost Town” is a formulaic coming-of-age tale swirled in soft-serve spook.
Perry grew up Jimmy Perrini in Creamwood, N.J., fictional but recognizable Perrotta country (he’s from Garwood) that he’s avoided in adult life. When the mayor invites him back to a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new municipal building, he is prompted, after many years of burying the dark aspects of his past, to exhume them. The result is less penny dreadful than mild freaky-deaky. Your spine will not be chilled, nor even remotely cooled.
Whoever options “Ghost Town” will want to check if the set decorator and costume designer from Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” are available. The novel is stocked with lemon shampoo; coconut suntan oil with low protection factor; Cap’n Crunch; a velour recliner and lava lamp. Characters wear bell bottoms or terry cloth gym shorts; they drive Camaros and Darts; they dodge the draft and toke up. The soundtrack to their young lives includes the Allman Brothers’ “Eat a Peach” on eight-track tape, and “Kung Fu Fighting” blaring from WABC on a portable radio.
Jimmy had a “normal” nuclear family that fissured fast. We barely get acquainted with his mother before she dies of cancer while he’s on the baseball field. From then on his older sister and their father, a union welder and volunteer firefighter, disappear into their own lives. (Besides grieving, Mr. Perrini is busy fabricating ductwork for a new A.&P.) The adults in this book are chalk outlines. Unpleasant topics — estrangement, architectural eyesores, drinking problems — are whispered in italics.
Jimmy bonds with Olivia, a smart older teen who lost her father and baby brother in a car accident. Trying to reach their dead parents using a Ouija board, they connect with a mysterious apparition identifying himself as Uncle Bob.
There’s a possibly creepy priest who tries to console Jimmy with a trip to the beach, a joyriding bad influence named Eddie and a clunky subplot about disruption to the racial homogeneity of Creamwood, whose on-the-nose name sounds like a brand stocked in that A.&P. frozen dessert aisle.
I have John Updike on the brain — A.&P.! — but then I always have Updike (dismissed by Bloom as “a minor novelist with a major style,” by the way) on the brain. Still, with Perrotta regularly anointed the 21st century’s foremost chronicler of adulterous suburbia, the eeriest thing about “Ghost Town” may be how its fiery denouement echoes 1971’s “Rabbit Redux.”
Does “Ghost Town” stink like the Oscar the Grouch garbage cans in downtown Creamwood? Nah. It has the practiced Perrotta polish; an easy shrug about how it will be received or remembered.
“That’s the thing about writing,” Perry tells a sparse crowd at the library where, “as the only famous writer our town has ever produced!,” per the mayor, he’s been invited to give a reading. “It’s all a big mystery. You don’t know where your ideas come from, you don’t know how to get them onto the page, and you have no idea how the world’s going to react to them. You’ve got to learn to be comfortable with the not knowing, or at least learn to live with it.”
GHOST TOWN | By Tom Perrotta | Scribner | 288 pp. | $28
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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