Book: Nine Inches: Stories
Author: Tom Perrotta
Published: 2013
Here’s the thing: Perrotta writes like he’s tapping
into this shared American consciousness, but he doesn’t tap – deep? Hard? I
refuse to keep the penis jokes to a minimum on this blog – enough to get the
depth of details he needs to make his characters or situations feel organic.
As it is, his high school slackers and overachievers and
stressed-out parents and lonely teachers are just a couple finer strokes away
from the finishing touches that would take them out of their arctypes.
Arctypes work for comics, genre fiction, or other media that
depend on something other than character (visuals, plot, setting) to do 51% of
more of the heavy lifting. But you can’t get away with that in realism literary
fiction.
Having lectured, let me tell you how fun and poignant the
title story is here: very. I went back to middle school dances and all the
absurdity and importance and hormones through a teacher who’s experiencing all
of it through his not-quite-unrequited crush on the art teacher and having to
break apart a moony couple over a dumb rule he doesn’t want to enforce. That
was great and made me tear up.
But everything else was surface level that took itself too
seriously. Back to the library it goes.
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