Ghosts of the past

Light and lyrical but haunted by loss, this 11th book from New Jersey-born Tom Perrotta (Election, Little Children, The Leftovers) takes on the longstanding literary notion that you can’t go home again.

Perrotta’s narrator is Jay Perry (that’s his pen name). Once a self-described “serious” author — by way of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a promising debut novel and a Newsday review calling him “a writer to watch” — he switched over to penning a bestselling kids’ series (Ghost Teacher, Ghost Teacher Loves You and Ghost Teacher to the Rescue!) that became a hit TV show.

Now in his 60s, Jay has been strictly literal about not returning to Creamwood, N.J., the small, blue-collar, mostly Italian community where he grew up. When he receives an email from the town mayor inviting him to attend the opening of a new municipal building dedicated to his father, he starts to wonder whether the memories he’s denied all these years aren’t still there, right where he left them.

In his mind, Jay returns to the summer of 1974, when he was a 13-year-old kid still named Jimmy Perrini. As Jay relates Jimmy’s story, the past and the present move toward each other, slowly at first and then with sudden speed.

When asked about his childhood, Jay has always said, “For a while there… we were a normal family.” Ghost Town becomes a gradual unpacking of what this easy assumption of “normalcy” means, especially in that time and place.

For young Jimmy, it’s enough to look like all the supposedly normal people look, to do what they do. His father is a union welder, a volunteer firefighter, a softball player. His mother is a Sunday school teacher and a member of the PTA. His older sister Denise is a bubbly cheerleader. “At least that was how he remembered it,” Jay thinks to himself, “though he also knew how slippery and unreliable memory could be, how it was always partly a work of fiction.”

The first obvious rupture in Jimmy’s sense of normalcy is the death of his mother from cancer. His father dazed, his sister preoccupied, teenaged Jimmy is left to fend for himself. He starts roaming Creamwood’s streets, getting into trouble with Eddie, the town burnout, who drives around in his Chevy Vega, smoking a lot of weed and listening to Deep Purple on the car stereo.

Jimmy begins a confusing, start-and-stop relationship with Olivia, an older girl who’s also been touched by loss. Olivia tells Jimmy they can talk to the dead, bringing out the Ouija board she keeps hidden in a Candy Land box.

Jimmy is intrigued. Since his mother’s death, he has already had the experience of hearing her voice or seeing her in the distance. But Jimmy and Olivia’s Ouija adventures seem to accidentally release something else, a presence signalled by a dank smell, “a glitch in the air.”

Perrotta brings in this spooky possibility, but Ghost Town is not really a ghost story and the supernatural element remains minor. What really haunts Jimmy is grief and what really haunts Creamwood is racism, misogyny and the fear of change.

Ghost Town’s short, sharp chapters breeze by, peppered with details of Jimmy’s ’70s adolescence — the Wrangler jeans and Hostess Fruit Pies and Blue Nun wine and top 40 radio songs. It’s not just nostalgia, though. Perrotta, who’s known as a chronicler of suburban dysfunction, is characteristically insightful in his small observations.

Unfortunately, he leaves some of his larger narratives underwritten. Jay does go home again, but some of Creamwood’s darker byways remain unexplored.

Alison Gillmor knows the verses to all the radio hits mentioned in this novel.