Ghost Town
Jay Perry closed the box on his early life at age thirteen after his mother died of cancer and, months later, his volunteer fireman father died fighting a neighborhood blaze. He has not even used his family name—Jimmy Perrini—since the mid-1970s. But he has been invited back to his hometown of Creamwood, New Jersey, to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new municipal building dedicated to his father. And the memories begin.
Perrotta is the well-regarded author of more than ten works of fiction, including two (Election and Little Children) that were made into motion pictures and one (The Leftovers) made into a television series that probes everyday as well as post-apocalyptic life in the suburbs.
Told from Jay’s standpoint as he looks back, Ghost Town captures small-town teenage life in the 1970s in flashes of recollections—playing in a grade-school baseball game, cruising the streets, smoking pot, sneaking a kiss—that layer over Jimmy’s sense of isolation and malaise. The storyline touches on attitudes about race and the sequelae of the Vietnam War and uses experiments with a Ouija board to connect with the spirit world.
The narrative does not take a deep dive; chapters are short, scenes move quickly, characters do not analyze but observe. Nevertheless, the overall experience is wistful and melancholic. Not a creep show foray into a ghostlike world, but a journey through a time of grief and the longing for links to past lives, Ghost Town is quietly, emotionally haunting.
