Tom Perrotta and the Summer That Broke a Boy

In “Ghost Town,” a writer finally confronts the grief he avoided for 50 years.

The Tuesday Review

(Scribner)

Tom Perrotta is best known for his comic novel Election — and for anticipating by 25 years the advent of Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt, a comparison that hardly seems fair, since Tracy Flick sometimes tells the truth.

But most of Perrotta’s fiction is rendered in a different palette, the sad light of Sunday evenings…