Yale University junior Danny, the protagonist of Tom Perrotta's Joe College, lives in two very different worlds. One is the worldly Ivy League school, where future CEOs and world leaders intermingle and read Whitman and Milton in between bong hits. And the other, his blue-collar New Jersey town, is where he spends his breaks selling sandwiches from his father's lunch trunk. When he is not driving the lunch truck back home, he spends time with his faithful, clingy girlfriend, Cindy, a working-class girl who is more street smart than book smart.

Things are much different at Yale, where he slogs through Middlemarch and courts Polly, a mercurial literature student who is sleeping with his favorite professor.

Set in the early 1980s, Joe College follows Danny as he treks his way through both of these worlds, and it is this tension between Danny's past and present that drives the novel. Having grown up in a town where everyone he knows has had to work to make due, Danny has trouble relating to some of his more privileged peers.

When a Bruce Springsteen song comes on at a Yale party, for instance, Danny can't help but notice that the song is being played "for the enjoyment of people who were going to end up being the bosses of the people the Boss was talking about."

That's not to say Danny is all together turned off by the Yale lifestyle. Throughout the novel, we see him grow more and more comfortable at school, spending time and partying with these future "bosses" while avoiding calls from back home, especially those from Cindy. But Danny can't escape his past forever, especially when his father has surgery and needs him to drive the lunch truck over spring break.

Don't write this book off as a downer, though. Class and background conflict aside, the book is much more J.D. Salinger than Karl Marx. Watching Danny as he stumbles through both college and hometown life is enormously entertaining.

Especially fun is Danny's interesting and eclectic group of friends, such as a dining hall co-worker who spends most of the novel planning an orgy and his pot-smoking roommates, with whom Danny observes, "What was this they (his parents) scrimped and sacrificed for all those years? So their son could spend his Tuesday nights drinking beer, smoking dope, eating weird food, and learning to see (President McKinley's) assassin's side of the story?"

Not as enjoyable to read is Danny's comical struggle with a group of lunch truck mobsters trying to take Danny's father's business, a sideplot that dampens the otherwise realistic and humorous novel. Regardless, Joe College is a good read for all college students who are forever struggling to find a balance between the past and the future.