Perrotta Waxes on Living in a 'Very Leafy Small Town'

It's always exciting when the New York Times runs the dateline: BELMONT (capitalized), Mass., especially so when the story is about someone else then the popular one-time frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president.

And in the final week of August, the paper that publishes all the news that's fit to print has been awash in write ups on long-time resident and noted fiction author Tom Perrotta.

The extensive coverage coincides with the release of his latest novel, "The Leftovers,"(St. Martin's Press) about a '“Rapturelike phenomenon” in which millions of people (spoiler alert: including Shaq and Adam Sandler) vanish one day, leaving their friends and families unsure how to respond' according to Times' feature writer Gregory Cowles. 

The cover of the Times' Sunday Book Review written by Stephen King, a review by the Times' scary chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, (who called "The Leftovers" "a poignant but deeply flawed novel") and a nice sit-down feature interview with a portrait of a seated Perrotta looking, well, writer like at his home in Belmont.

The Times also put online 30-minutes of Cowles interview with Perrotta and a five-and-a-half minute excerpt of the audio version of the novel published by Macmillan Audio.

Whew!

And despite Kakutani's less-than-enthusiastic view of the novel, HBO thought enough the book to pick up the film rights to produce a series from the book. 

In addition, A.V. Club – the arts and culture online publication of the humor magazine, "The Onion" – also interviewed Perrotta about his book and his life in suburbia. 

And because the action in "The Leftovers" takes place in a suburban town in New Jersey – Perrotta's home state – the interviews touched on the author's present hometown.

And we learned that:

• "[Belmont] is a very leafy small town with good schools, but it’s only six miles outside of the city, and it’s very easy to get into the city." (AV Club)

• "Now I live here, but I’m not from here, whereas my kids will be from here. I’ve been very conscious of what it means to be a newcomer as opposed to somebody with deep roots." (AV Club)

"Mr. Perrotta’s quiet Massachusetts neighborhood is not unlike the quiet New Jersey neighborhoods in his books. Trees line the sidewalks, and girls in Belmont Marauders sweatshirts push bikes uphill past well-groomed lawns. On its Web site, Belmont calls itself “the Town of Homes,” the kind of quirky, humble detail that seems intended to appeal to a novelist of Mr. Perrotta’s sensibilities — as does the fact that the journalist Sebastian Junger (who grew up in Belmont) once wrote a book suggesting that the Boston Strangler had struck here in the 1960s." (Gregory Cowles, New York Times)