For a guy who grew up in working-class New Jersey and spent most of a decade wondering if his writing career would ever catch fire, Tom Perrotta’s done pretty well for himself, with two novels that have been turned into movies and a third that was a popular TV series. His latest book may end up on a screen, as well, and Wednesday he’ll be reading from it in the Brattle Theatre. “Ghost Town” is a compelling coming-of-age saga set in 1970s New Jersey, where three teens are dealing with grief and intolerance.
It’s a coming home novel of sorts for Perrotta, who set it in a town called Creamwood, which sounds a lot like his hometown of Garwood. Jimmy Perrini is a teenager whose mother has died suddenly. He’s on summer break and his father and sister work long hours and are emotionally distant, meaning Jimmy is essentially on his own, “just kind of wandering around this town,” Perrotta said.
Jimmy’s unsupervised existence creates opportunity for self-discovery as well as a gateway for risk and bad influence. He catches on with Olivia, an older student he has a crush on who also has lost a parent, and Eddie, an edgy burnout who becomes the trio’s main instigator.
Olivia and Jimmy end up experimenting with a Ouija board to contact their dead parents. “That’s where the sort of ghost story comes in,” Perrotta said. “That comes out of my own teenage experimenting with Ouija boards. I got totally freaked out by it when I was 13 or 14 years old. When people say, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’’ it’’s like, ‘well, I did that night.’”
The story’s twist, Perrotta said, “is that the spirit they get into contact with is not the one they were looking for.” Another development has to do with race and tolerance. When Jimmy’s cousin marries a light-skinned Black woman, where Creamwood — like Perrotta’s Garwood in the post-Civil Rights 1970s — is predominantly White. “It was all White,” Perrotta said of his hometown, “and it wasn’t just all White by accident. Realtors just wouldn’t show the homes to Black people and then suddenly this Black guy is living in this town where he’s not supposed to be …and so Jimmy’s story kind of intersects with that story.”
Perrotta, who lives in Belmont, has a page-to-screen sweet spot with such notable cinematic adaptations as “Little Children” (2006) and “Election” (1999), as well as the post-rapture TV series, “The Leftovers.”
Perrotta’s dad was a mail carrier and his mother “was a great student and wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t — because she had to work to help the family out,” he said. “But she was very insistent that her kids were going to go to college.”
Perrotta went to Yale then got an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University. He found his way to Boston, worked McJobs and taught at the Harvard Extension School while writing — and not finding much traction. “I was starting to wonder if I had to rethink my plans,” he said.
In 1994 he published “Bad Haircut,” a collection of short stories, and was subsequently invited to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont where he read from his novel in progress, “The Wishbones.” That story featured an antihero guitarist whose life and career were going sideways. A screenwriter in attendance knew of some producers looking for new material and connected them to Perrotta. “The Wishbones” wasn’t ready, he told them, “but I also have this other book that’s been sitting in my drawer about a high school election.”
That unpublished manuscript became 1999’s quirky, arty teen romp “Election”, directed by Alexander Payne (“Sideways,” “The Holdovers”) and starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. “They really loved it,” Perrotta said, “and Hollywood was making teen movies back then.”
The film became a hit. “It changed everything,” he said. And all that from a manuscript that had been in a desk drawer for three years. “I remember being on set,” Perrotta chuckled, “and somebody introduced me to Matthew Broderick and said, ‘This is Tom, he wrote the book,’ and Broderick just looked very puzzled and said, ‘There’s a book?’”
(The book version ended up being published before the movie came out.)
Perrotta has now published 11 books, and was a writer and co-creator for the HBO series version of “The Leftovers” and collaborated with Todd Field, the director of “Little Children,” on the film’s script.
Given both where he grew up and that his stories tend to largely deal with troubled men in troubling situations, it’s no surprise that Philip Roth is one of his chief literary influences. Raymond Carver is another who gave Perrotta ballast and inspiration early on, “because he was writing about working-class characters and focused on people’s economic situation.”
As to what’s next, Perrotta is noncommittal but contemplative about the process, “I’ve been rediscovering my life as a fiction writer,” he said, “I think people can be haunted by their conscience and their memories. You don’t really need some objective or external phantom—that’s coming from inside of you.”
Perrotta will be in conversation about “Ghost Town” Wednesday at the Brattle Theatre with the Boston Globe’s Meredith Goldstein, an event presented by the Harvard Book Store. Brattle passes will not be accepted. The event is $35 with a copy of the book and $12 for general admission. Copies will be available for purchase, and Perrotta will sign books after the event.
A stronger
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