Joe College

It's hard to fathom just how weird college life is until you've had some distance from it. When you're immersed in it, it's either the most awesome time in your life or the scariest, depending how well you assimilate. I mean, think about it, when else are you going to be surrounded by the smartest, most beautiful people, all in the prime of their lives, all your own age, all thrumming with youthful energy. Yeah, sure, some people have to work through college, some people are terrible at studying and that's stressful, but, hey! For the first and last time in your life, you have 24 full hours in a day to do what you need and want to do (that's thanks to the youthful energy).
There's also some weird stuff--like trying to reconcile your home life with your dorm life, your hometown persona with your masquerade as a smarty who actually does belong at, say, an Ivy League, but that's where great fiction is born.

Tom Perrotta (best known for Election and Little Children) must have been my current age when his novel Joe College was published and I cannot get over how well he captures what it's like to be, in his case (and his protagonist's case) at Yale in 1982. Danny is a classic middle class, New Jersey boy who gets plucked from his weird little suburban cul-de-sac life, and dropped into the equally weird world of higher learning. Oh, there's no question he belongs there intellectually, and certainly we don't meet him until his junior year so he's assimilated. Still, you can take the boy out of New Jersey, but you can't...well, you know. Back home, Danny drives his dad's Roach Coach luncheon wagon from one office park to the next. Back home, there are the weird little home-meals of bland middle America food, there's his father's pending hemorrhoid surgery, there's the secretary-league high school classmate whom he dates and then mentally dismisses among his Ivy League friends (not in the mean way that sounds). There are also some things more specific to New Jersey that contrast to Yale as well. Danny runs afoul of a gang of lunch truck thugs (only in NJ), replete with baseball bats, and Mafia-like leaders. I know New Haven has a bit of a run-down element, but I don't think it's quite the baseball bat, smashed headlights kind of run down that Danny meets back home. The description of the gang is priceless. Where Vito Senior [natch, they're Italian American] seemed avuncular and basically good-hearted, tired in a seen-it-all sort of way, Junior just looked puzzled and mean, like he suspected you were going to put one over on him sooner or later and wanted to wring your neck before you got a chance to do it.

It may seem that an Ivy League education insulates you from the rougher edges of the world, but it turns out that being brainy and privileged in one town, doesn't mean you can avoid getting beaten up (and having your lunch money stolen, as it turns out) in another town. You also don't get to avoid the sticky business of sleeping with a girl you don't have a future with, especially if it seems you are her future. That's real life versus college life.

And of course, Ivy League life brings its own oddities--Danny has wealthy friends who would prefer not to be, or they play at being poor, or they lie about who they really are because they know they can't possibly live up to their parents' expectations. Danny's parents are more or less stunned by Danny's college life while trying--poorly--to hide their bewilderment. Danny thinks of them occasionally when suite conversations turn so utterly from the real world. [I] was thinking of my parents, and the way my life sometimes seemed to embody their worst suspicions about college. Was this what they'd scrimped and sacrificed for all those years? So their son could spend his Tuesday nights drinking beer, smoking dope, eating weird food, and learning to see the assassin's side of the story [in this case, the guy who shot McKinley]?

Perrotta captures the bizarre late night discourses, the feeling that everyone else is in on "it" and somehow you're not, the anxiety of the first time you are told to mark up a text book--or worse, a novel (very strange, if you've gone to public school all your life) and the utterly uniquely collegiate phenomenon known as the a cappella singing group. No, I know there's a cappella in the 'real' world, it's just that there's a strange obsession and posession each student seems to have with their school's a cappella group. Perrotta might as well have been describing my own college's (male) group when he says, Resplendent in their formal wear, the Whiffenpoofs stood in a semi-circle in front of the nonfunctional fireplace, crooning "Surfer Girl" for their captive audience. One of them was black, one Asian, one short, one both short and prematurely bald; the rest looked like close relatives of Vice President Bush. And yes, they do the weird antics like dropping trou to reveal Hawaiin shorts, etc... The Whiffenpoofs have a pretty big role in this book, or at least, they pop up just as they do throughout one's college career.

Danny figures out his life, more or less, as one must with graduation looming. He doesn't always do the right thing and sometimes he just seems to skate along, but as he himself admits--after not getting his head bashed in by Junior--that sometimes he's just lucky. I think that's the point--you escape by luck from your middle of the road life and find yourself at Yale (or similar schools) and from there on, it can seem as if your life is touched by magic. That's kind of why some pay so much for a higher education. It's not the class work, it's the connections you make. I just enjoyed this foray back into that time, without my having to do the work or the sleepless nights.