Michael Paulson

In Tom Perrotta's new novel, Joe College, Danny juggles his working class background with the social and academic demands of Yale. The story, set in 1982, alternates between the rarified air of New Haven and the grimy roads of industrial New Jersey, where Danny's father grinds out his days in a lunch truck nicknamed the Roach Coach.

Perrotta is the author of three previous novels, including Election, a biting satire of high school politics that was made into a well-received film of the same name. He returns to familiar territory in this latest chronicle of New Jersey youth, this time setting the scene in college instead of high school. The crux of the novel is Danny's rocky negotiation of various situations, some comic, some romantic, some life-threatening. He constantly dances back and forth between the academic stratosphere and the dish line where he works at a university dining hall. Trading barbs with salty-tongued cooks one minute and flinging deadpan jokes about George Eliot at his fellow student-workers the next, Danny (we never learn his last name) seems comfortable straddling both worlds, but still a subtle undercurrent of otherness troubles him. His struggle for acceptance continues like a nagging thought throughout the book.

Danny's various love interests further complicate matters. Cindy, a Jersey girl he met while driving the Roach Coach on break from college, looms ominously with her incessant phone messages. Her opposite number at Yale, the beautiful and intriguing Polly, intermittently dates one of the English department's rising stars, simultaneously dropping Danny thinly veiled hints of interest. These matters alone would sufficiently occupy the time of a college student, but during Danny's spring break, circumstances force him to operate the Roach Coach just as the neighborhood mob moves in on the lunch truck business. With a bravado deliciously incongruous with his Yale pedigree, he threatens a mob foot soldier, insults the local don, and acquits himself surprisingly well when cornered by a gaggle of beefy Mafiosi.

Perrotta has created a funny, likable protagonist in Danny, and the perfect vehicle in which to crack wise about Yale, New Jersey, and everything in between.

Michael Paulson teaches English at Penn State University.

Alexander Short works in the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers as a reference specialist, spending his days amid call slips and idiosyncratic librarians. When he receives an elegantly penned query for a book titled Secret Compartments in Eighteenth-Century Furniture, Short becomes embroiled in a search for a priceless watch that gradually consumes his professional and personal life. The Grand Complication, Allen Kurzweil's second novel, takes this premise and spins an intelligent mystery spanning two centuries.

Henry James Jesson III, a middle-aged, wealthy, enigmatic collector, enlists Short to help track the Grand Complication, an antique watch that would complete one of his collections. Jesson is a genuine eccentric who lives alone (save for a butler) in a cloistered Manhattan house, speaks in archaic, erudite diction, and remains egregiously ignorant of all things modern. Short rigorously researches the history of the Grand Complication, from its creation by a Swiss inventor to its theft from a Jerusalem museum. Meanwhile, Jesson manipulates him by withholding information, Short's wife throws him out of their apartment for his growing obsession with the watch, and the young librarian navigates the treacherous water of library politics in an effort to keep his job and locate the fantastic timepiece. Kurzweil balances the dialogue deftly, alternating between Jesson's antiquated, high culture pronouncements and the younger Short's more colloquial speech; their contrasting voices nicely demonstrate the divide between the two protagonists, a gulf that becomes increasingly demarcated as the story progresses. The library itself serves as mute third protagonist. Kurzweil sets much of the novel there, and he continually drops wonderfully eclectic nuggets of information into our laps regarding the Dewey Decimal System, book binding practices and conservation techniques. The library's staff, including stuffy mandarins and autodidactic janitors, flesh out the story. Indeed, Kurzweil delights in using these secondary characters as colorful backdrops to the plot.

A charming energy floods the novel, and Kurzweil neatly pulls off the author's trick of entertaining even as he educates.

Michael Paulson teaches English in Baltimore.