Coming of Age

Tom Perrotta has written some popular coming of age novels, not quite innocence-to-experience (since no one is quite innocent even at the beginning) but from experience to greater experience, from adolescent confusions to greater clarity. Everyone seems wiser and calmer at the end. But the comic trajectory is cheaply bought. There is no recognition of prior wrongs, and characters tend to get off way too easily. If you extrapolate a decade ahead, it’s hard to see that the characters have put their youthful follies to rest.