Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

 

This book is simultaneously mundane almost to the point of nonexistence, and a very weird and difficult book for me to comment on. The POV character goes through some rough shit, about the same age I went through functionally the same rough shit, but his experience seems wildly more positive than mine--and the novel smells very strongly of autobiography, which doesn't make me inclined to like it better, if I'm honest: not because I dislike autofiction, but because it just makes me resent the author more than I resent the self-insert main, here. He got stuff he could turn into a bland bildungsroman, I spent four years disintegrating in my bedroom. Some of it is probably the ten years' difference (the novel is set in what has to be 1974, I went through my crap in 1985) and some of it is probably some fundamental difference between the kinds of suburbs. This is not a horrible novel, but I cannot muster the distance to say much else about it.