Fear and Loathing in the Northeastern Suburbs

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In the title story of Tom Perrotta’s new collection of short fiction, Nine Inches, a high school teacher chaperones a dance, and his job is to separate any students who might be slow-dancing a little too closely. Because of a school-sponsored event that got out of hand a year before, all students are required to obey the eponymous “nine inch” rule—they have to stay at least that far apart from each other at all times. The teacher is given a length of yellow measuring tape, but refuses to use it when he spots two seventh graders dancing to Snow Patrol at the end of the night, “clinging to each other in perfect, almost photographic stillness,” and can’t bring himself to break it up. Rules of decorum in a manmade society seem so arbitrary, and never more so than in the face of something as primal as the urge to share the animal warmth of those around you.

That’s a theme that runs throughout all of Perrotta’s ten stories in Nine Inches. Indeed, that’s a theme he’s been exploring since his first book, the totally underrated and seldom-read Bad Haircut[1]. Perrotta’s adept at setting characters in the ennui-laden land of suburbia, where once-passionate citizens have tamed and tranquilized themselves into monotonous existences. Perrotta’s view of suburbia has always been bleak, the deck stacked a little too obviously: everyone moves there because they never questioned whether they shouldn’t, and as a result they all end up trapped and longing for a better life. It seems unfair to just assume that no one ever bought an SUV and a three-bedroom house because they wanted to—because that itself was their (totally valid) dream[2].

Consequently, Perrotta’s best characters here are the teenagers, who certainly may despise the suburban hellhole in which their trapped, but also 1) haven’t chosen to be there, and 2) suffer from boredom rather than ennui, which makes all the difference. These characters also fit nicely into the theme mentioned above, i.e. not understanding etiquette when it conflicts with their raging hormones and changing minds. In “Senior Season,” for instance, a football player named Clay gets a brain injury and has to sit out. His friends can’t fathom his newfound inability to enjoy sports or parties, and his girlfriend moves on to the guy who took his position. Clay wants to join his friends—or rather, he wants to want to join them, but can’t gather up the energy, and can’t understand why he has to keep all of these feelings in check. Likewise, the young girl, Jessica, in “Grade My Teacher,” finds it (rightly) unfair that her older sister is pretty and popular while she seems to have been cursed with extra weight. And the aforementioned teenagers in the title story won’t even listen when their teacher tells them to break it up, “as if they had no one to answer to but themselves.”

All of these characters are touching and real, and we feel for them, mainly because they don’t feel like gimmicks. They’re heartbreaking because they’re still young, still yet to be graduated into the barren world Perrotta describes. Maybe that’s the other reason the teenagers work best here, what makes each of their endings so bittersweet: we know they’ll leave this hellhole once they turn eighteen, but we also know they’ll return to it when they get desk jobs later on, the only difference being that this time they have only themselves to answer to.

To say that what Perrotta does in these stories is a gimmick would be ungenerous, because the “gimmick” is that he continually draws portraits of two seemingly disparate people, then gets them to realize each other’s humanity. It’s a nice sentiment and it’s actually saying something substantial—that the commerce and comfort we seek in everyday life has blunted our ability to step outside our comfort zones and discover people who aren’t like us—so it’s not a gimmick. Still, there are ten of these stories, and their narrative rhythm gets familiar pret-ty fast, and by the time you get to the home stretch you’re hoping that at least one of them is going to surprise you with its plot, rather than just with its characters.

In Perrotta’s defense, he tries to find new avenues to reinforce that whole comfortable living=fear of leaving comfort zones=living in a private bubble=never connecting with strangers theme. One avenue that pops up again and again here is technology[3]. People google themselves, a sad ex-musician looks up chords on Youtube, recently-dumped teenagers look at Facebook statuses of their girlfriends and posted pictures of wild times at college, an unpopular teacher looks herself up on a site called Grade My Teacher, etc. It happens so often that it must be a deliberate choice, and it works kind of, at least thematically. But, not to be unkind, it also gives you the what-a-shame feeling you get when one of your favorite authors is obviously past his prime and doing what he can to stay hip[4].

But Nine Inches is worth a look. Perrotta’s more of a novelist than a short fiction writer, it’s true[5], but that’s not to say his short fiction isn’t worth reading. The prose can get a bit pedestrian, but that’s because he’s dealing in pedestrian people, often uneducated or at the very least willfully ignorant of their own situations, so it makes sense that they have trouble articulating themselves. And anyway, the accessibility of the language makes for a quick read, a welcome change from the dense and purposely opaque New Yorker fiction so often jammed down our throats.



[1] and p.s. to the publishers calling Nine Inches his “first true collection of short stories”—what a lame marketing scheme. Bad Haircut may be a linked collection—the same protagonist first-person narrates every story in the same past tense POV—but it is unquestionably a collection of stories, seeing as there’s no cause-and-effect between what happens, the only surefire sign that one follows the last simply that they’re chronological. End rant.

[2] This is probably why Little Children is his best novel, since it actually subverts that premise and exposes all of the yearning, I-want-more-than-this adults as the somewhat-adolescents they are, while still maintaining their dignity.

[3] Which, again, he began exploring in Little Children, wherein Sarah’s husband fell in love with an internet porn star, to hilarious effect, and probably would have made Ronnie the Child Molester meet his blind date on OKCupid had it existed at the time he wrote it.

[4] I suffered a similar and unfortunate feeling when I read Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked a few years ago, through which iPods flowed like a self-consciously middle-aged river.

[5] You’ll notice this more than anywhere in “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face”, the earliest-written story here and the one clearly conceived of between drafts of novels, since every time a new character appears, there’s at least a paragraph-long biography, a sure sign of an author used to more time and space.

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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