The Wishbones

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Summary: Tom Perrotta rocks the house with a wonderful debut novel.
Review: "The Wishbones" is as enjoyable as spending time with some classic Springsteen albums. It's a novel of dreams, of love, of life and it's also laugh out loud funny. Perrotta knows how to find the humor of real-life situations without exaggeration. Dave Raymond and this wonderful cast of supporting characters are well-drawn and memorable. If you enjoyed Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity" (also a superb novel) you'll not want to miss "The Wishbones."

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Summary: Would have made a fascinating longer read..
Review: 'The Wishbones' is a sharp, witty and fast read, which doesn't cover any revolutionary territory or come to any deep worldy conclusions. However, it is entertaining enough and undoubtedly better than Perrotta's latter works, namely 'Little Children'. However, I did not think it was quite as good as most reviewers have suggested, simply because it doesn't draw itself out long enough to develop anywhere important.

Perrotta appears to have a deep seated fascination with sex and adultery, and for this reason, his collection of works are not entirely dissimilar and can lack the drive and purpose they should. His characterisations are wonderfully developed and wildly humourous, yet because the plot doesn't develop, you come to question the purpose of these fantastic side-characters.

Basicially, I felt that 'The Wishbones' was well-written and beautifully voiced, but that it failed to clearly articulate a purpose or sense of artistic depth.

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Summary: I wanted to like this, honest.....
Review: ...but apart from the fact that Perotta has a deft way with words and has his rock 'n roll trivia down cold (quick, who is Mick Box?), I saw the turns the plot was going to take as soon as the main character says to his girlfriend of 15 years, "Let's get married." I don't know, maybe it's one of those books that really wants to be a movie...

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Summary: American HIGH FIDELITY
Review: A fun novel, very much like Nick Hornby's excellent (and admittedly better) book, HIGH FIDELITY.

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Summary: The perfect beach read.
Review: A great reminder for the groom of what it is to get married. Wonderful passages of a small time band doing the circuit. You'll finish feeling you got to know all these characters as friends.

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Summary: Marvelous...funny, touching,....a great novel
Review: A touching, humorous story about a thirtysomething musician facing the realities of "growing up" is the backbone of this wondeful novel by Tom Perrotta. If you enjoy rock n' roll, love, sex and laughing out loud, this is the book for you! It's also a touching love story about friendship and romance. A must read!

Rating:
Summary: A stylish moral comedy
Review: Another fantastic novel by Tom Perrotta!

After reading "Election", I knew nothing this man wrote could fall short of engrossing, and I was right.

Although "The Wishbones" is an easy read, it is one which still offers a critical reading into the lives and choices of the characters within. However, I'd say that this book is almost deceivingly simplistic. Perrotta sneaks all these mundane scenes in, such as two characters (prospective son- and father-in-law) watching TV together, and you'll probably wonder why you're reading a scene of two grown men who are incapable of communicating with one another on a common level. But with Perrotta, it's all about detail. Pay attention to the small things that aren't so small. Suddenly the scene becomes a farce, a comic tableau of what it means to be family, of how it feels for young Dave, a modern Everyman, to be sitting next to the old guy who recently caught him boinking his 30 year-old daughter in the rec room, with nothing on but a hot pink condom and a pained expression.

Here is a young guy who feels as if the huge weight of an impending wedding is bearing down on him, while the TV shows a history program recounting the last days of WWII, complete with snapshots of tankers looming in the foreground. Cut to another part of the world on the small screen and the Hiroshima bomb is spreading out in slow motion. Perfectly executed!

"The Wishbones" is just this: the life of a young man spreading out like a bomb, and the effects of it - visually dazzling and beautiful from one perspective, horrific from another.

A second must-read from Tom Perrotta.

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Summary: A rare book that "gets it" about the musician's experience.
Review: Despite the plethora of books on popular music, very few ever succeed in portraying the milieu and experience of the working musician. The nature of the subject is far from that which is imagined by fans, involving perspectives, values, and outlooks common to those on the "inside" and only rarely fully perceived by others. Nick Tosches's "Hellfire," about the extraordinary life of Jerry Lee Lewis, powerfully reveals some of the struggles of a particularly volatile participant in the creative process. And Oscar Hijuelos's beautiful "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" sensitively portrays the feel of life for the musician. Tom Perrotta has taken a different tack with "The Wishbones" but he joins the short list of those who "get it" about the musician's experience. Many readers have commented on the book's truly delightful characters, with good reason. Additionally, the humor in the book is the kind which leaves one--immediately--wanting to tell one's friends about it, so that it might be shared. As a musician, however, this reviewer can safely testify that "The Wishbones" is directly on target; remarkably so. No, not every musician is precisely like those in Perrotta's gang. But the feel is right. Very right. This is the kind of writing that gives the word verisimilitude a good name

Rating:
Summary: Don't Miss it!
Review: Hey, it could happen to anyone. You're sitting in the basement of your girlfriend's parents' house, having stopped by there to tell her about how your wedding-band rehearsal went, and something about the way she uses snack foods to mark her place in her book, something about the way the leg of her sweatpants pushes up, causes a synapse to misfire, somehow. Suddenly, you hear yourself saying, "Let's get married," despite the fact that you've spent the thirty-one years of your life thus far avoiding commitment of any kind, never even having moved out of your parents' house. So now what do you do?

If you're Dave Raymond of the Wishbones, premier wedding band of suburban New Jersey, you goggle helplessly as events spin out of your control, watching your three little words create a wedding machine of invitations and favors and lists and dates and rehearsals and rings and gowns. You seek advice from your bandmates: Buzzy, the stoner-turned-family-man; Stan, who's falling apart now that his wife has left him; and Ian, the sexually ambiguous pretty boy with Broadway-musical ambitions. Oh, and you pick up an attractive bridesmaid at a gig, smoke a joint with her, and start cheating on your bride before you've even married her.

Tom Perrotta's prose is literary Ginsu. Every line, every bitingly funny description or subtle pop-culture satire, is a razor-sharp knife edge, slicing through and peeling back layers of the single American male's consciousness. What's at the heart? Lots of confusion, not enough willpower, but plenty of good intentions and wry, self-deprecating humor. It's tempting to call this the American equivalent of High Fidelity, and indeed, the two works have a number of similarities: humorously low-key and immature guy refuses to commit to loving and responsible girlfriend; guy embarks on an affair to prove something - he doesn't know what - to someone - he doesn't know whom; guy eventually realizes that the pros of having a girl around might outweigh the cons of having to grow up and settle down. But The Wishbones is a little more gooey, not playing every scene for laughs; Perrotta acknowledges that nothing is without its own brand of humor, but allows his characters to take things seriously, and really gets you worrying about them and hoping that things work out okay, for their sakes.

I'm about as un-Dave-like as a girl could get, but I know the type, and Perrotta does a wonderful job of creating a bunch of genuine, funny, rounded characters who make a lot of bad decisions and just enough good ones to balance it out. This is one of those books that makes you feel like the characters are your friends; reading the pages is like listening to a pal tell you the latest gossip about your social circle. Read it, buy it, recommend it to all your guy friends, whether they're single or in a relationship. Everyone needs to read this book! Along with THE LOSERS CLUB by Richard Perez, this is the best Amazon purchase I made this year. Don't miss it!


Rating:
Summary: One of the funniest books I ever read
Review: I bought this book because one of the blurbs said you would laugh out loud while reading it and I did -- several times. Perrotta captures that suburban aimless angst and his writing is funny and charming. I've recommended this book to everyone I know and no one has been disappointed.