78
TIME OFF OPENER
N
o novelist can know in advance what
kind of life a character might have beyond the
page. When Tom Perrotta’s wry, perceptive
comic novel Election was published in 1998, he
couldn’t have known that the name Tracy Flick would come
to signify a certain type of young—or even not so young—
woman, an ambitious overachiever with a steamroller ap-
proach to conquering the world. In Alexander Payne’s
Oscar-nominated 1999 movie version of the book, Reese
Witherspoon played Tracy, a calculating senior hell-bent
on becoming her school’s president, with equal parts sugar
and vinegar. That portrayal burned the character’s most de-
finitive traits deep into the public’s imagination. And since
then, any intelligent, indefatigable, vocal woman who goes
after what she wants—whether that’s a Hillary Clinton or
a Kayleigh McEnany—has been at risk of being branded,
derisively, a Tracy Flick. The name has become a kind of
misogynist shorthand.
That was far from Perrotta’s intent. If you read or reread
Election today, you’ll see that, even as he delights in Tracy’s
most irritating quirks, his sympathy for her runs deep. He’s
as attuned to her loneliness as he is to her iron will. And
with his eighth novel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, to be pub-
lished 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. She’s much too complex for that.
“Tracy never went away, for me or for the culture,” Per-
rotta said recently, speaking from his home outside of Bos-
ton. “That never happened with anything else I wrote.”
And he’s written a fair amount. In addition to his best-
selling novels, Perrotta 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 2011 and
2017 novels, The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher, into acclaimed
series for HBO.
Tracy Flick Can’t Win is his first sequel, and he didn’t ex-
actly set out to write one. Initially, he wanted to examine
the messy state of modern American masculinity by invent-
ing a faded former high school football star, Vito Falcone,
who’s called back to his old stomping ground to receive an
award. Only once Perrotta had really dug into the writing
did he realize that Tracy needed to be a part of the story.
“Because this guy is her worst nightmare. And once I added
her to the mix, the story had this other center of gravity.”
For Perrotta, creating Flick was a leap of faith.
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. He ended up at Yale,
graduating in 1983, and enrolled in the graduate creative
writing program at Syracuse University a few years
after that. 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. 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. And I was scared.”
Perrotta had come to think of him-
self as “kind of a guy writer,” he says.
“Bad Haircut is all about male friend-
ships, and The Wishbones is about
these guys in a band. I knew I had to
stretch beyond that. That was the rea-
son I tried to write Election with those
multiple viewpoints. I felt I had to be
on the side of every character, and to
see them as full people. And to give
them parts of myself, I think.”
If it took Tracy Flick a while to
emerge in the world, she’s now here
to stay. 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 afair with another teacher that
led to his downfall, while she simply
moved on—is now a dedicated but be-
leaguered assistant principal at a sub-
urban New Jersey high school. 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. Now she’s raising△
Tracy Flick
Can’t Win is
the first sequel
in Perrotta’s
body of workBEN E. KING—HBOTime Off is reported by Eloise Barry