“Is There Life After College?” by Michael Thomas Perone

Is There Life After College?

Michael Thomas Perone
Red Penguin Books (2026)
ISBN: 978-1637778975
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (08/2026)

Michael Thomas Perone’s Is There Life After College? is a funny, irreverent, and ultimately surprisingly serious coming-of-age novel about the rude awakening that comes when the carefully structured world of school suddenly disappears. Set in 1999, the novel follows twenty-two-year-old Mark Jans, a Hofstra University valedictorian who has spent virtually his entire life succeeding at school and assuming that achievement, faith, and hard work will eventually point him toward the life he is supposed to lead.

Unfortunately, the “Real World” has other plans.

Mark’s troubles begin before he even graduates. His girlfriend, Jane, breaks up with him; he has no job waiting, and his parents announce that they have sold their house and are moving to Florida. Rather than follow them, Mark makes the impulsive decision to head for Manhattan with his diploma, Bible, and manuscript, The Loneliness of Man, convinced that he can somehow talk his way into the publishing business.

What follows is an increasingly ridiculous collision between Mark’s sheltered optimism and late-1990s New York. His efforts to get his manuscript published go spectacularly wrong, including a hilarious attempt to impersonate an established author in order to sneak into a publishing house. Soon Mark is broke, homeless, and discovering that his communications degree and impressive academic record are considerably less useful on the streets of Manhattan than he imagined.

Then he meets Astra.

Astra is almost everything Mark isn’t. She is a beautiful, sexually uninhibited, fiercely independent punk who distrusts conventional morality and has little patience for Mark’s religious certainties. Their conversations become one of the novel’s strengths. The two argue about God, sex, free will, morality, suffering, and what it actually means to live an authentic life. At first, they seem constructed to irritate one another. Gradually, however, each begins exposing weaknesses in the other’s worldview.

Astra also carries a horrific past and is deeply wounded beneath the tough persona she presents to the world. Mark, meanwhile, has wounds of a very different sort. His comparatively protected upbringing has left him almost comically unprepared for failure, ambiguity, and people whose lives cannot easily be divided into right and wrong. Their relationship becomes the emotional and philosophical center of the book.

Perone keeps the story moving with broad humor, absurd situations, and a steady stream of late-1990s cultural references. Mark can be naïve, self-righteous, and occasionally exasperating, but that is largely the point. His certainty has to be tested before he can develop anything resembling wisdom. Astra is the catalyst for that transformation, but she is never simply a vehicle for Mark’s education. Her own struggle concerns whether a person can escape the things that have been done to her—and the things she has subsequently done to survive.

As the novel progresses, its comedy gives way to considerably darker territory. Violence, addiction, suicide, sexual abuse, religion, sexuality, justice, and forgiveness all become part of a story that initially appears to be a comic tale about a clueless college graduate trying to survive on his own. Some of these tonal shifts are abrupt, and Perone is rarely subtle about the philosophical questions he wants his characters to confront. But there is also something appealing about the novel’s willingness to ask those questions directly.

The title turns out to be more than a joke about post-graduation anxiety. Mark begins the book believing adulthood is another course he can somehow ace if he learns the rules. What he discovers is that there are no rules capable of covering every human situation. Education may teach him how to construct an argument, but Astra teaches him something considerably harder: how to question his own conclusions.

Is There Life After College? is ultimately a novel about leaving certainty behind. Mark’s journey does not require him to abandon faith so much as reconsider what faith means when confronted with people whose experiences do not fit comfortably within doctrine. Beneath the jokes, romance, tragedy, and occasionally outrageous plot turns is a compassionate argument for humility. Growing up, Perone suggests, has less to do with finding all the answers than finally understanding why some questions cannot be answered so easily.