![]() But his impulsive decision to hand the election to Tracy’s opponent, cheerful jock Paul Metzler, is inspired by watching her react to the news she had won: “The sight of her at that moment irritated me in a way I can’t fully explain. ![]() M hates her for sleeping with his friend, a fellow teacher, who was fired for the violation. M, a discontented middle-aged man who rigs Tracy’s race for class president. In revisiting his initial foray into gender politics, Perrotta sometimes comes off as the one hoping to explain himself - though he gently mocks that instinct, presenting a series of proxy male characters insistent they are, in fact, “one of the good ones.” Principal Jack Weede in Tracy Flick, for example, muses how “uys like me are the old guard we’re presumed guilty whether we’ve done anything wrong or not, though many of us have sinned, I’m not denying it.”Įlection centers on one of these dead men walking: Mr. Not much has changed, in other words, except for the ways the capital-C Culture thinks and talks about these things. Where Election begins with a mention of Anita Hill’s allegations against Clarence Thomas, Tracy Flick does so with the fall of men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Matt Lauer. Like its predecessor, Tracy Flick opens with a slice of sociopolitical context, a literary equivalent of cinema’s establishing shot. But at its heart, the book is a referendum on all its characters, conducted in-house by the characters themselves, and on Election. ![]() Tracy Flick Can’t Win reflects on the #MeToo movement, on the recovery of adolescent trauma and the misguided glorification of high school athletics, on the toxic culture of tech bros, on the myth of meritocracy. “Pick Flick,” her campaign buttons blare. This is to say, if, at the end of the film, you think you know enough to pass judgment on Tracy Flick, you’ve missed the point. He foregrounds the characters’ inability to tell the truth about themselves to themselves, never mind to their peers - or to us. Payne co-opts Perrotta’s multiple first-person narrators, not as an act of narrative generosity, but as a trick to expose the fissures between what people say and what they do. Where Perrotta offers reconciliation, Payne opts for ugliness where Perrotta is compassionate, Payne is merciless. This sharp distinction between Perrotta’s Tracy Flick and Payne’s has everything to do with genre: the novels are comic treatments of real life, while the film is a stone-cold satire. For the restless students and the miserable faculty and staff, high school is a purgatory from which few are promoted upstairs. There is not an ounce of nostalgia to be found in the novel or its adaptation, only unflattering chinos and hatchback vehicles as far as the eye can see. You might recognize that maniacal glint in her eye from that girl in high school who you always hated - or from looking in the mirror every morning.Įlection is set in high school, but don’t hold your breath for a prom scene or a hunk dating a nerd on a bet. The 1999 film adaptation of Perrotta’s Election, directed by Alexander Payne, provided the breakout role for 23-year-old Reese Witherspoon as the young Tracy, a neatly coiffed high school politician with more than one secret. In fact, her cinematic one far eclipses her literary legacy. Perrotta’s characters do the best they can with the mediocre hands they’ve been dealt, trying to conduct their personal lives with dignity, to execute their jobs honorably as beleaguered assistant principal Tracy Flick repeats in her meditation mantra, they strive to “be the flame.” Why, oh why, does it have to be so damn hard? In Tracy Flick Can’t Win, as in his other works, Perrotta is open to rewarding his characters with happy endings, provided that the dimensions of their contentment remain modest.īut Perrotta’s pages are not the only life that Tracy Flick has lived. TOWARD THE END of Tom Perrotta’s Tracy Flick Can’t Win, a lonely divorcee named Diane says to herself, “This is my life It’s the only one I have.” What a crystallization of the Perrottaverse - its lonely suburbanites, its lost young men, its unraptured “remainders” - in all its quiet desperation.
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