A word of praise for Tom Perrotta's "Joe College." This novel fell between the buzzy "Election" and the buzzy "Little Children," and so it was sort of overlooked. Perrotta said he wrote about Yale in part as a way of growing up. He had written about his childhood in Jersey over and over, and then "Joe College" became a bridge novel. After the Yale novel, Perrotta was able to move on to the concerns of adulthood--memorably, in "Little Children," and again in "Mrs. Fletcher," etc. Like "Death of the Brown-Haired Girl," Perrotta's novel concerns the Yale of the recent past. Unlike "Brown-Haired Girl," Perrotta's novel explicitly names Yale as its setting. Writers tend to be outsiders, and so they tend to write about outsiders. Danny, Perrotta's protagonist, doesn't really fit in at Yale. He comes from a working-class family--his father drives "THE ROACH COACH," a mobile coffee...