Michael Mastromatteo | OSV News
Ghost Town
Tom Perrotta, Scribner, New York, (2026)
288 pages, $24.36
Boston-based novelist Tom Perrotta is described by some critics as the John Steinbeck of suburban America.
With novels punctuated by themes of alienation, rootlessness and quiet despair, Perrotta’s works echo Steinbeck’s Depression-era stories of desperate characters searching in vain for better things.
Perrotta’s latest novel, “Ghost Town,” released this past April, tells the story of New Jersey resident Jimmy Perrini coming of age from an impressionable teenager to a middle-aged writer who has been invited back from California to his home town to reflect on his career highlights.
The novel is told from differing time periods — the protagonist’s graduation from elementary school in the 1970s to his present-day circumstances as a talented writer who has sacrificed his creative ideals to take up work as a screenwriter for children’s television programs.
The protagonist’s eventful summer, between the end of elementary school and the start of high school, is made more stressful with the passing of Jimmy’s mother after a long illness. The death sends Jimmy into a tailspin in which he begins to question long held concepts of personal growth and emotional security.
Perrotta, the author, was raised in a Catholic household in Newark, New Jersey, but has developed an ambivalent attitude to the faith today. Nonetheless many of his works touch on themes of suffering, confusion and a longing for traditional things that no longer hold sway over our lives.
Part way through the story, the Jimmy Perrini character voices concerns that occur to many young people on the cusp of adulthood. “When you’re thirteen, you don’t know what to think or who to believe. You’re just beginning to realize that adults aren’t as smart as you thought they were, and a lot of things that had been presented to you as facts your entire life are really just opinions or wishes or half-baked theories, like the idea that dead people go to heaven … It felt fake — too good to be true — like a story adults had invented to make children feel better and ended up believing themselves.”
With “Ghost Town,” Perrotta resists the temptation of some contemporary novelists to heap scorn on the Church for the priestly abuse scandals and for some of its orthodox prescriptions. While the protagonist Jimmy is a lukewarm Catholic, he is guided as a teenager by the committed but compassionate Father Paul.
Looking to console Jimmy over the loss of his mother, the priest invites the teenager to spend a day at a local beach. “Jimmy forgot about that day for a long time, and didn’t think about it again until decades later, when everything started coming out about Catholic priests and the terrible things they’d done to so many kids. It made him wonder about Father Paul, if maybe he’d been one of the bad ones, if his reasons for taking Jimmy down the shore weren’t entirely innocent … All he could say at the end was that Father Paul hadn’t done anything creepy or inappropriate. He brought Jimmy home and shook his hand, and said that he hoped to see him in church one of these days.”
The book succeeds in capturing moments in time especially poignant to Baby Boomer Catholics. Arcing through the optimism of the post-World War II years, through to the upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s, and culminating in the present day, with its attendant concerns about social division and political extremism, the novel at the very least provokes the reader to reflect on a number of profound but prosaic turning points in human life.
“Ghost Town” is more likely to resonate with readers of an older demographic, but its message of uncertainty and the loss of confidence in the things imparted to children should appeal to a wider readership. The book at times seems semi-autobiographical. The protagonist Jimmy, like Perrotta himself, comes from an Italian-Catholic background, was raised in a New Jersey suburb, and set out on a career as a writer.
But if “Ghost Town” contains some autobiographical elements, its themes of loss and disillusionment are more universal.
As Jimmy describes the community of his youth, one notes Perrotta’s lingering sense of wistfulness, thwarted ambition and the haunting qualities of one’s past. “The houses were alike, and so were the people who lived in them. No one was rich — an above-ground pool or an attached garage seemed like the height of luxury — and it was rare to meet an adult with a college degree, or a father who hadn’t served in the military. Almost everyone Jimmy knew was Catholic, and most of them were Italian-American. The whole town celebrated the same holidays, ate the same food, watched the same TV shows at the exact same time.”
Ultimately, “Ghost Town” is a sobering but thoughtful lament of disillusionment and uncertainties that arise when the comforting adages of childhood and early adolescence begin to fade.
As an adult, Jimmy Perrini discloses throughout the narrative, one’s memories and reminiscences can become “slippery and unreliable” as the years pass by. “[Memory] was always partly a work of fiction,” the protagonist concludes. “It’s a product of imagination and denial and wishful thinking, and often no better than an outright lie, even when you believed yourself to be telling nothing but the truth.”
Mike Mastromatteo is a writer, editor and book reviewer from Toronto.