Tom Perrotta has a fairly typical suburban dad biography. He and his wife moved here to Belmont, in part, for the schools; he coached his kids in youth soccer, and he even plays guitar in a band, making appearances at PorchFest.
Perrotta falls back on that suburban life in his full-time gig as a highly regarded novelist whose work has been converted into movies and hit television shows. Suburbs, such as Belmont, are often the setting and focal point for his novels.
“I think the most clear thing people talk about is the use of the pool…the pool is pretty recognizable in “Little Children,” he said. “I think that’s the one that made people think I was writing about Belmont, and I can’t say they were wrong.”
He sees his work taking place in a more generalized suburbia. In “The Abstinence Teacher,” that suburban population is split roughly even between evangelicals and liberals; in “The Leftovers,” it’s Mapleton, New York.
Perrotta is ready to launch his latest novel, “Ghost Town,’ on April 28. Set in a New Jersey suburb near Manhattan, it traces the life of Jimmy Perrini, who returns home for the first time in years and confronts a series of dark moments from his past. Narrated by his older self, the book explores the past, its impact on the present, and the fact that you can never really put it aside forever.
Perrotta himself grew up in New Jersey, moving to Massachusetts to teach at Harvard. He lived in Watertown for a few years, then moved to Belmont for tried-and-true reasons.
“We heard the schools were really good, and it was just a mile away from where we were living,” he said.
They lived in Cushing Square for a while, with his daughter attending Butler Elementary School. At first, the plan was to find a tenure-track job teaching writing. That, Perrotta said, would likely have taken the family elsewhere.
“This job at Harvard was a five-year contract, and just as it was ending, the movie, ‘Election,’ was made,” he said. “And that changed my life.”
The movie, nominated for an Academy Award and several Golden Globes, among other awards, set him on the path that allowed him to stay in Belmont.
The idea of “Election” came from a news story Perrotta read about an educator who had blown up their career, rigging an election for prom queen.
“It just got me thinking what it would take to make someone like me do something like that,” he said.
Over time, Perrotta’s creative muse has evolved. Early work called back to guys he knew growing up, playing in bands, or his own experience at Yale University. When Little Children arrived, he found himself trying to respond to the wider world.
“I think ‘The Abstinence Teacher ‘ was an attempt to write about the culture war and the possibility of dialogue across ideological divisions,” he said, “And The Leftovers was kind of an attempt to engage with all the sort of apocalyptic energies that were kind of brewing in the culture at the time.”
He is, he said, often responding to public events, tying them to a character story, and it is always a mix of public and autobiographical in his work.
According to Perrotta, the legacy of his work will likely orbit around the novels adapted for the screen. “The Leftovers” debuted on HBO in 2014 and ran for three seasons. Perrotta called it an unusually ambitious piece of television.
“A Hollywood producer recently was telling me that he gets a lot of pitches where people are saying their new work is “The Leftovers,” meet something else.”
Ghost Town is slated for release on April 28, and on Wednesday, April 29, Perrotta is scheduled to appear at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge.