GHOST TOWN

On the eve of a return visit, a long-absent hometown boy recalls the sad summer after eighth grade.

Jimmy Perrini was in the middle of a baseball game when the news arrived: His mother, just 41, was dead. He knew she’d had cancer but she’d assured him she would never leave him, and he’d believed her. More than 50 years later, the man who now goes by Jay Perry is invited by the mayor of Creamwood, New Jersey, to come back for the naming of a new municipal building after his late father. In the intervening years, Jimmy Perrini has become the only famous writer the town has ever produced, though the early promise of his literary novels petered out and he’s become known for a children’s series that became an animated TV show, Ghost Teacher. Perrotta’s evocation of 1970s suburban New Jersey is filled with resonant period details: the Top 40 playlist, the Mexican dirtweed, the tension between the largely Italian American blue-collar residents and the very few in their midst who are different. One of these is Jimmy’s cousin Wayne, who lives next door with his possibly non-white girlfriend and their summer houseguest, a young Black man named Hector. Set adrift by grief and his father’s and older sister’s inattention, Jimmy floats into an unsavory friendship with a rough stoner named Eddie. He also connects with a super-smart older girl, Olivia, who suggests they try to contact his mother using her Ouija board, and is also game for a bit of sexual initiation. Perrotta, who’s known for edgy satires like Election (1998) and Mrs. Fletcher (2017), creates a very different mood here: melancholy, moving, dark, redolent with regret and loss. His sharp characterizations and social observations serve to bemuse rather than amuse this time, but as he builds to a shocking climax, it turns out he’s just as good at that.

Maybe you can go home again, but do you really want to? An atmospheric elegy to innocence lost.