She’s appalled by unearned male advantage. “But she’s aware that these men get all these unearned advantages, and that she’s constantly being put in the shadow of men who are her inferiors. “I don’t think she’d use the word ‘ patriarchy,’” he says. Yet he’s sure that she is still, in some sense, a feminist. While Perrotta doesn’t dig into Tracy’s politics in the new book, he notes that she’s probably rather conservative. And if Perrotta was cognizant of that injustice in Election, he’s even more keyed into it now. I’m much more interested, anyway, in thwarted ambition and midlife malaise than I am in people who are running the world.” It made sense, he says, “that Tracy would end up in her old battleground, still fighting for these small prizes.” After all, this is still a world where mediocre men often have an advantage over smart, hardworking women. In considering where the modern-day Tracy Flick would end up, Perrotta says, “I didn’t think she had taken over the world. Why shouldn’t she step right into the top job? She’s earned it. But Tracy’s sense of ambition reignites when she learns her boss is about to retire. Now she’s raising a daughter of her own, Sophia, the product of a brief affair she had with a married professor while she was pursuing a PhD in education. The law degree she’d always dreamed of never came to be her promising trajectory at Georgetown was cut short when she left to care for her ailing mother, who has since died. In Tracy Flick Can’t Win, the teenage overachiever we once knew-the one who was almost cheated out of her high-school presidential win by a meddling history teacher, the one who had an affair with another teacher that led to his downfall, while she simply moved on-is now a dedicated but beleaguered assistant principal at a suburban New Jersey high school. If it took Tracy Flick a while to emerge in the world, she’s now here to stay. And to give them parts of myself, I think.”
#Psequel cant connect full#
I felt I had to be on the side of every character, and to see them as full people. That was the reason I tried to write Election with those multiple viewpoints. “ Bad Haircut is all about male friendships, and The Wishbones is about these guys in a band. Perrotta had come to think of himself as “kind of a guy writer,” he says.
But both of those books were largely about men Election, he says, “was the first book where I really tried to write women characters, in a central way. Though Election was one of the first books he wrote, it wasn’t the first to be published: that was Bad Haircut: Stories from the Seventies, in 1994, which was followed by The Wishbones in 1997. He ended up at Yale, graduating in 1983, and enrolled in the graduate creative writing program at Syracuse University a few years after that. He’d grown up in New Jersey, in a working-class family, and though it had never occurred to him that he might attend an Ivy League university, a careers teacher at his high school persuaded him to try. And once I added her to the mix, the story had this other center of gravity.”įor Perrotta, creating Flick was a leap of faith. “Because this guy is her worst nightmare. Only once Perrotta had really dug into the writing did he realize that Tracy needed to be a part of the story. Initially, he wanted to examine the messy state of modern American masculinity by inventing a faded former high school football star, Vito Falcone, who’s called back to his old stomping ground to receive an award. Tracy Flick Can’t Win is his first sequel, and he didn’t exactly set out to write one. Read More: 27 New Books You Need to Read This Summer
He also co-wrote the screenplay for an adaptation of his 2004 novel Little Children, which earned him an Oscar nomination, and he helped make his 20 novels, The Leftovers and Mrs. “That never happened with anything else I wrote.” Which is not to say that this best-selling writer hasn’t found success with other projects. “Tracy never went away, for me or for the culture,” Perrotta said recently, speaking from his home outside of Boston. And with his eighth novel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, to be published June 7, Perrotta catches up with Tracy as an adult, rescuing her from the fate of being used as an easy symbol of, well, anything. He’s as attuned to her loneliness as he is to her iron will. If you read or re-read Election today, you’ll see that, even as he delights in Tracy’s most irritating quirks, his sympathy for her runs deep.
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