Liars and Saints

  Tom Perrotta is a name I'll always notice; among his novels, "The Wishbones," "Election," "The Leftovers," and "Joe College" are my favorites.  Perrotta's special skill is his ability to describe moments of mundane discomfort. We all live through these moments; we just don't commit them to the blank page. In the new novel, "Ghost Town," a young man, Jimmy, meets a stranger and bluntly concedes that his mother has just died. But then he thinks he sounds glib, so he offers a few sentences about his mourning. And he realizes that the sentences might be what they (in fact) are: nervous, meaningless throat-clearing. Life goes on. "Ghost Town" is set in Garwood (called "Creamwood"), NJ, in the 1970s. Everyone is white; everyone smokes cigarettes. A dispute might involve a schoolteacher and a hippie at the local McDonald's. "I understand your  flat feet  kept you out of Vietnam...." In this small...

 Tom Perrotta wrote "Election" because he was interested in George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot. Perrotta didn't want to comment directly on Perot, but he did have thoughts about power, and about human emotion; Perrotta also knew that the meanest political stories are the "smallest" political stories. So Perrotta wrote about a high-school election; he turned Perot into a stoner girl, a D student, a student determined to spread chaos through various overly bright high-school hallways. A similar idea forms the center of "Tracy Flick Can't Win." Again, the stakes are amazingly low. One character is a school vice-principal; she really wants to be the principal. Another character had an affair with her boss many years ago; now, she'd like very much to get a kind word from this guy, or maybe a "farewell" coffee mug. Tom Perrotta makes me think of Richard Yates -- who was relentlessly bleak, and who poked holes in inflated egos, always. It's...

Michael Connelly says that evil is just a dull fact in the world; it's just there. What's interesting, to Connelly, is how *decent souls* wrestle with and accommodate and *are changed by* evil. It's like the add for "The Prodigy," the new and slightly underrated horror movie. In the add, we see the face of a little boy, and half is painted for Halloween: Half is a kind of skeleton. (The other half is just a boy-face.) A soul wrestling with evil--not yet consumed by evil. It's the struggle--the act of wrestling--that generates interest for the viewer (or reader). I thought of Connelly in reference to "Election," by Tom Perrotta, a book that I reread this week. It's really more like a short story--stretched out via generous spacing and font-size. "Election" became a cultural sensation in America--mainly because of Reese Witherspoon's dazzling performance in the movie adaptation. Witherspoon had not been a name, before--and here she ...

The first time Lt. Finnegan pulled me over, I actually thought he was a pretty decent guy. I mean, there's no question I was going over the limit, maybe thirty-five in a residential zone, so I can't say I was surprised to see the lights flashing in my rearview mirror. I was mostly just frustrated--disappointed in myself and worried about what Eddie would say when he found out I'd gotten a speeding ticket in the company Prius after just a few weeks on the job. The cop who tapped on my window was older than I expected, a big, white-haired guy with a white mustache, probably not too far from retirement. He looked a little bored, like he'd asked a few too many people for their license and registration over the years. "What's the hurry, son?" "Just running a little late." I glanced at the insulated pouches stacked on the passenger seat, in case he'd missed the magnetic decal on my door: SUSTAINABLE PIZZA...FOR THE PLANET WE LOVE. "I got...

Tom Perrotta said, in the NYT, he finds himself returning again and again to a "personal canon": Tolstoy, Balzac, Henry James, Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, and others. This led me to think about which writers I'd put in my canon--the writers I return to again and again--and here are the ones who made the cut: -Tessa Hadley: Hadley has said of Ginzburg, "She chooses words so carefully, they seem to have actual weight, like physical objects." Hadley does the same thing. Her awareness of the sensory world is unusual. She juxtaposes odd words. She looks for counterintuitive insights, and the dream in her head is so vivid, you feel as if you're playing with some kind of virtual-reality box. -Amy Bloom: She was my teacher, but I also just love her writing. I love that she has a sense of humor *despite* writing literary fiction. She also made me aware of the importance of absurdity. If your writer doesn't seem clear-eyed about life's ridiculous...