Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

Published by Scribner on June 7, 2022

Tracy Flick, the protagonist in Tom Perrotta’s Election, did not grow up to be president because life does not always cooperate with ambition. She is an assistant principal at Green Meadow High School. Thanks to a weekend affair, she has a daughter named Sophie. Tracy is dating an older orthopedic surgeon who is starting to become a bit clingy.

Tracy’s goal is to project the image that she is competent and trustworthy so that she will be elevated to the principal’s job when Jack Weede retires. Tracy worries that she reeks of Eau de Loser, having failed to win the principal’s job at three other schools.

Weede will be retiring soon to travel to with his cancer survivor wife, much to the dismay of Front Desk Diane, the secretary at the front desk who used to shag Weede in his office. School board member Kyle Dorfman tells Tracy that she’s a shoe-in for the job, but Tracy knows that nothing in life is certain.

Tom Perrotta’s novels are driven by amusing characters. Thanks to a one-hit-wonder app, Dorfman, unlike most residents of Green Meadow, has money. That explains his presence on the school board. He easily convinced the board to let him fund a Green Meadow Hall of Fame. The first candidate (other than Dorfman himself) is Vito Falcone, a school bully who was the school’s only notable athlete, having played a couple of years in the NFL. Choosing a jock, Tracy thinks, is “the most obvious and depressing choice in the world,” but she’s not about to make waves. As part of his twelve-step program, Vito is apologizing to all the people he harmed. It’s a long list.

Other nominees for membership include a student who died in Vietnam, a student who prevailed in a sandwich eating contest, and a successful car salesman. The committee rules out the only other noteworthy jock because he got charged with a crime for fighting a white cop who didn’t want a black guy dating his sister.

One of the members of the committee to choose Hall of Fame inductees is a student named Lily Chu. She has a relationship with someone named Clem who uses “they” as an identifying pronoun. Lily needs to keep them from meeting her conservative parents, who think Clem is a girl named Amelia.

Ultimately, Tracy’s story, like Vito’s, is one of “squandered promise” — their best years were their high school years, with so much potential ahead, all unrealized. That would be (and has been) a strong premise for a deeper novel, but Tracy Flick Can't Win isn't a novel that attempts serious depth.

The loose plot that holds the characters together is Tracy’s quest to become a principal. Tracy’s life history is one of being stabbed in the back by people she trusted. Whether that will happen again seems to be the question that drives the plot until it doesn’t. Perrotta splinters off a number of apparent subplots that remain undeveloped or exist for no reason, never becoming subplots at all.

The story and characters are sufficently entertaining to earn my recommendation, although the recommendation comes with some warnings, including the frustration of a splitered plot. More importantly, the novel takes a surprisingly dark turn at the end (surprising for a Perrotta novel, anyway), perhaps as a reminder that high schools these days can be dark places. Given the lightness of the story until that point, the ending is a bit too jarring to be satisfying. Had its antededents been explored in greater depth, the ending might have a success. An epilog attempts to reassure the reader that Tracy Flick Can't Win is more light than dark, but the epilog seems to be tacked on to please readers. At least Perrotta avoided the sin of predictability.

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