Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies

Fortunately, Perrotta's debut collection not only avoids the pitfalls but also manages to add something to our collective sense of a decade in which the Vietnam War raged an ocean away and platform shoes dated long before they wore out. The 10 stories that, taken together, add up to Bad Haircut follow Perrotta's protagonist, Buddy (no last name given), as he moves from junior high to college. "Bad haircut" is as good a way as any of not only describing the butchering in "You Start to Live" - a story about his ill-fated love affair with a student beautician - but also the sense one has that, for Buddy, every day is a bad hair day.

As Buddy's coach/driver's-ed. teacher puts it, "You know what your problem is? You're a spectator. You're happy to just stand around and watch. You don't take charge of a situation." Granted, Coach Bielski is more stereotype than oracle, but on this occasion, he is dead right: Buddy is a chronicler in the grand tradition of Winesburg, Ohio's George Willard - this, despite the fact that he joins a group of local toughs on missions of mindless violence and does his best to walk the walk, talk the talk. Still, we know, from the collection's first story ("The Wiener Man") that this is a young lad who will leave the fictional Darwin, New Jersey and one day come to write of it.

Meanwhile, Buddy's classmates provide him - and Perrotta - with wonderful material. Here, for example, is how one describes the feeling of being in love: "It's like the world's in black and white, but Wendy and I are in color." Another is described as shooting looks "that most people reserve for vacuum cleaner salesmen and Jehovah's Witnesses." But bright one-liners aside, it's the stories tucked inside Buddy's stories that make the collection distinctive:

The year after that, Zirko made his mark on the world. He got busted for dumping paint in rich people's swimming pools. He'd slip into their yards in the middle and drop the open can like a depth charge straight to the summer and might have ruined a few more if he hadn't developed an urge to release the paint in broad daylight. He told the cops he wanted to watch the colors swirl.

Perrotta's Darwin (pop. 5,342) is small-town American seen through the requisite filters of class, race, and gender; but perhaps even more important, it is a world small enough to see the particulars in gritty detail, yet large enough to encompass wide expanses of the heart. Some of the stories in this collection first appeared in literary journals such as The Gettysburg Review and Crazyhorse. Given the impressive evidence thus far, I suspect we will be hearing from Perrotta for some time to come. His voice is a welcome addition indeed.

SANFORD PINSKER Franklin & Marshall College

COPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction
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