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Our ghosts are always with us
Book Review
By Derryll White
Perrotta, Tom (2025). Ghost Town.
Tom Perrotta was born and grew up in New Jersey, and ‘Ghost Town’ faithfully portrays the mild suburbia just miles from Manhattan. He has a very nice touch, bringing the reader into a landscape and life which are different from the reader’s, but similar in many known ways. Jimmy Perrini loses his mom at 13 and learns to cope with loss and with life as he threads his way through a lonely summer.
Jimmy’s dad is a working stiff, a union welder, who loses himself in his work. This is the 1970s and all of those tropes mover out of the past – racism, marijuana, spiritualism, hippiness.
Many readers of a certain age will remember a lot of this – some with fondness and some with a cringing denial. The use of a Ouija board will certainly recall spooky but warm memories.
This is also a book about writers and writing. Jimmy becomes a literary-turned-commercial writer, and in the evolution learns how our ghosts, the memories and events we carry within, are always with us. We think we have left them behind, but Tom Perrotta suggests that almost never truly occurs. ‘Ghost Town’ forces the reader to remember. Look for it.
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Excerpts from the novel:
MEMORY – At least that was how he remembered it, though he also knew how slippery and unreliable memory could be, how it was always partly a work of fiction, 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.
LIFE – I used to tell people that I had two different writing careers, one for love and one for money, but I don’t believe that anymore. The truth is, it’s all been one thing, just a bunch of variations on the only themes that ever mattered to me.
Ghosts and Orphans.
Orphans and Ghosts.
The ways we’re abandoned and never left alone.
WRITING – “That’s the thing about writing,” I said. “It’s all a big mystery. You don’t know where your ideas come from, you don’t know how to get them onto the page, and you have no idea how the world’s going to react to them. You’ve got to learn to be comfortable with the not knowing, or at least learn to live with it.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
