Greil Marcus' Real Life Rock Top 10 - 7) Tom Perrotta, "Joe College" (St. Martin's)

"After the perfect-pitch "Election" (forget the bludgeoning movie version), this coming-of-age novel, set in 1982, is a trifle -- and no novelist, no matter what age he's coming of, can be allowed to present "If Ted and Nancy were a plausible couple, why not Polly and I?" as if it were English. Still, there are moments when the reflections of the working-class Jersey-Yalie narrator turn him into someone you'd like to meet: "I remember watching the debate between Reagan and Carter and feeling a huge abyss open up at my feet when the commentators began declaring Reagan the winner, even though he'd seemed to me to have performed a fairly plausible imitation of a twinkly-eyed village idiot. I wondered if it was Yale that had made me such a stranger to my own country or having smoked too much pot as a teenager. In any case, it was unnerving to find myself dwelling in a separate reality from the majority of my fellow citizens, my parents included. I was enough of a believer in democracy -- or maybe just safety in numbers -- to not be able to derive much comfort from the stubborn conviction that they were wrong and I was right."

Hullo, it's like my own feelings about the current election...