When Tom Perrotta was growing up in 1960s and ’70s New Jersey, his father was a volunteer firefighter. “We had this radio in our house that would crackle in the middle of the night and say, ‘There’s a fire!’ ” the novelist recalls on a video call from his home in Belmont, Mass. “Every night they did a test at eight o’clock, so it was always in the background: this burst of static, and then a voice.”
Perrotta’s new novel Ghost Town, out in April from Scribner, is very much concerned with voices bursting through the static. The protagonist, like Perrotta, is the son of a New Jersey firefighter who grows into a celebrated novelist. The fictional setting of Creamwood, N.J., is like Perrotta’s native Garwood once was: a functionally segregated factory town sliding into financial obscurity at the end of the Nixon era.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Ghost Town began to take shape when Perrotta returned to his childhood home a few years ago. During the early part of the Covid pandemic, Perrotta’s elderly mother started having health issues, and he began commuting from New England to New Jersey to take care of her. “I felt the presence of the past very clearly, and the absence of the happy young life I remembered,” he says. One memory that resurfaced was the fact that Perrotta’s mother had come close to death before, when the author was six years old—something she didn’t tell him or his two siblings about until many years later. From there, more pieces of the novel started clicking into place.
Perrotta’s 11th book, Ghost Town follows eight previous novels and two short story collections. His early work, including
his debut 1994 collection Bad Haircut, stuck close to his native New Jersey. Ever since the author broke out with Election in 1998, though, his work has largely skirted autobiography. Following in the footsteps of Election’s indelible Tracy Flick, the most memorable characters that Perrotta has written this century have been women—including the protagonist of Little Children, which Perrotta adapted into an Oscar-nominated screenplay, and Nora Durst in The Leftovers, whom Carrie Coon played in that novel’s HBO adaptation.
“I did consider writing about working-class New Jersey and a teenage boy as a return to an earlier phase of my career,” Perrotta admits. “I was thinking a lot about Philip Roth, who I really admire, and who grew up very close to where I did. He kept returning to that childhood world in his later years, and you never felt like, Oh, here’s a guy who’s unable to move on. It was more that this was a mythic world for him that was larger than life, and he could somehow say really large things within a very localized context.”
Told mostly in flashback, Ghost Town unfolds during summer 1973, when 13-year-old Jimmy Perrini’s mother dies of cancer. Distraught, aimless, and essentially abandoned by his grieving father, Jimmy befriends Eddie, a 16-year-old burnout who teaches him how to smoke weed, and Olivia, a lonely older girl who tries to help him contact his mom with the help a Ouija board. That primary narrative is nestled inside a frame story in which middle-aged Jimmy, who has become the commercially successful but artistically bankrupt novelist Jay Perry, considers an offer to return to Creamwood for the first time in several decades to host a reading.
In interviews, Perrotta often speaks of his interest in the classroom as a literary setting. Election and its 2022 sequel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, examine high school as a savage microcosm of American politics. The Abstinence Teacher (2007) follows a divorced sex-ed instructor who clashes with her students’ conservative parents. Tellingly, Ghost Town takes place in the hazy stretch of time between school years, when meaning is malleable and structure has fallen away.
“If I think of my project as a writer as, ‘All of life is an education’—a political education, a sexual education,” Perrotta says. “Then in this book, Jimmy is out of school, but he finds teachers, for better or worse. In the ’70s, there was some sense that we were a free-range generation: we didn’t have parents looking over our shoulders, and we had to learn how to deal with our problems ourselves. But sometimes that led to kids of a very young age finding themselves in adult or bewildering situations.”
In contrast to rosier coming-of-age narratives, Ghost Town walks a razor’s edge between nostalgia and disillusionment, marinating the reader in a not-quite-tender, not-quite-melancholy mood that’s ever so slightly chilling. The Vietnam War haunts the margins of the
narrative. Jimmy’s neighbors court controversy by inviting their Black cousin to stay with them in lily-white Creamwood. Perrotta often thought of Stephen King’s novella The Body, the source text for Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me, as he was writing. And though one can almost hear Richard Dreyfuss delivering some of adult Jay Perry’s lines, the grown man in Ghost Town is far more reluctant to revisit his formative years than King’s wistful narrator was.
“I was torn between this positive nostalgia for my mother and my childhood, and this growing recognition that I grew up in an all-white town,” Perrotta says, noting that he plotted much of the novel amid the 2020 George Floyd protests. “So much nostalgia—especially toxic political nostalgia—rests on whitewashing the past. This book was an attempt to do justice to just how complicated that past is.”
It was also, Perrotta says, his stab at writing a ghost story. (Or at least, given the novel’s framing device, writing a book about someone who’s writing a ghost story.) Though few would mistake Ghost Town for a pure genre novel, a gently mystical current runs beneath its realistic surface. Jimmy insists throughout that he can feel his late mother’s presence, having his first semi-supernatural encounter with her partway through her funeral. When he and Olivia first consult a Ouija board, they make contact with what appears to be the spirit of an escaped convict.
Perrotta was inspired, he says, by his own memories of playing with a Ouija board when he was roughly Jimmy’s age. “I remember walking home from my friend’s house in the dusk and feeling the world teeming with presences,” he recalls. Decades later, while contemplating his mother’s impending death, Perrotta wondered if he could recapture some of that otherworldly sensation in prose. “It seemed somehow rich, and it connects with this sense I have that, as I get older, the world is full of absences that are pressing against the surface,” he says. “Ghost is definitely the reigning metaphor for me.”
Perrotta’s mother died while he was writing Ghost Town. Of his parents, he says she was the one pressing books into his hands,
which spurred him to identify as a writer by his sophomore year of high school. Had she succumbed to her illness when Perrotta was six, he figures he might have ended up working in one of the factories that lined Garwood in the mid-20th century, manufacturing dental supplies or nylon flex hoses.
Instead, he gets up early each morning in the suburbs of Massachusetts, knocks out a few hours of writing, then spends the afternoon running or biking or doing yoga to burn off the nervous energy he’s accumulated. It’s a privilege, he admits, that sometimes makes him feel as far from the young strivers of today as they might feel from 1970s New Jersey. “Another vanished America,” he says,
half smiling.
