Jeremy Has a Huge Crush on Tom Perrotta

A review of Tom Perrotta’s Nine Inches

I was gonna go on this big gushy tirade about Tom Perrotta, the elegant subtlety of his writing, etc. But it occurred to me that a few months back I skewered Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat for some the same reasons I’m inclined to praise Perrotta’s new story collection Nine Inches. So I figured I owed it to our readers and to the authors to investigate what might be perceived as a double standard on my part.

Let me begin by stating that I’m extremely biased here. While Bobcat was the first thing I’d read by Lee, I’ve long been a fan of Perrotta’s work. The first book of his that I read was The Abstinence Teacher, which I tore through in a matter of days and then returned to months later for a second read. Same with the beautifully disturbing Little Children. I’ve since read everything he’s published, and each time I’m amazed by the simplicity of his prose, his ability to capture moments of extreme emotional complexity with such deftness and accessibility. Nine Inches is no exception; each of the ten stories is crafted with an eye toward linguistic simplicity, the result of which is remarkably stirring. In the first piece, “Backrub,” we witness an unusual instance of vulnerability between a recent high school grad trapped on the cusp of adulthood and a lonely traffic cop. From there we offered glimpses into the private lives of a Little League baseball umpire (“The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face”), a varsity football player recovering from a life-altering injury (“Senior Season”), an awkward teen involved in an illegal test-taking business (“The Test-Taker”), and plenty of other colorful characters searching for a human connection that, for whatever reason, their lives don’t seem to offer.

What makes Nine Inches similar to Bobcat is the recurrence of the same themes in almost every story. While Bobcat focused almost exclusively on academia, Nine Inches preoccupies itself with high school, or rather how that period of a person’s life affects her and the people around her, as in the title story “Nine Inches” and “The All-Night Party.” In this context, Perrotta’s interest is the way in which normalcy as we see it, the colorless calm of domesticity, often gives way to moments of absurdity and desperation and irrationality. We are interested in these characters’ lives insomuch as we can recognize something of ourselves in them, more than likely one or more of our own failures.

As such, each of these stories follows a firmly-established trajectory that mimics the lives of the characters. Fans of Perrotta’s work will know his knack for plot movement; his narratives are like machines, each part executing a specific function in unison with the others, which only makes the inevitable what-the-fuck moment in the story all the more potent: we know damn well that something is going to happen, something is going to go wrong, and yet we are still stunned when it does.

I think this is where Nine Inches differs from Bobcat. The latter does not exhibit the same sense of forethought and planning, the stories don’t necessarily move or perform any sort of function but rather announce themselves as artifacts from which we are to derive some sense of meaning. And for a lot of folks, this is perfectly reasonable. But it doesn’t imbue the characters with enough agency to make them relatable, and it doesn’t speak to the author’s investment in the characters.

Nine Inches, however, leaves no doubt as to the author’s concern for his characters–not necessarily for their well-being (where’s the fun in that?) but at least for ensuring that their struggles mean something, that it illustrates some abstract component of the human condition.

So maybe I am gushing a little, but whatever. I am aware that this all comes down to preference. Reviewing books is a pointedly subjective process (particularly when you’re doing it for free [*pats self on back*]). But I think the first thing that any reader asks him/herself is: what can I take from this? What’s in it for me? In the case of Nine Inches, the answer is a series of closely-related stories that demonstrate to us how illusory the American Dream is, how any attempt to perfect one’s life is balanced out by instability and unpredictability. There’s nothing ostentatious about this book, but that’s sort of the point.