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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Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta

Published by Scribner on August 1, 2017

The point of Mrs. Fletcher, I think, is that life is always changing, no matter what stage our lives have reached; that we are always called upon to make choices as our circumstances change; that a fair percentage of those choices will turn out to be bad; and that we do the best we can with the choices we make. Of course, unfortunate choices can be really funny when they’re made by other people, and the only point of Mrs. Fletcher might be the laughter it inspires as the characters blunder forward with their lives.

Eve Fletcher works in a community center for the elderly, a fertile source for Tom Perrotta’s brand of comedy. Eve’s self-absorbed son Brendan is off to college, leaving behind his self-absorbed girlfriend after breaking up with her by text. For a few years, Eve has been divorced from her selfish husband Ted, who left her after meeting a Casual Encounter on Craigslist. Eve is now preparing for an empty nest by posting positive messages on her Facebook status and waiting for encouraging “likes” from her 221 friends. But Eve is needy and immediately feels abandoned, particularly when (after day 3) she stops receiving her promised daily text messages from Brendan. All of this motivates Eve's desire to leave her old self behind, a desire that manifests in sexual interests beyond her limited experience, as she considers sex with a young college student, sex with a woman, and sex in a threesome.

In the first part of the story, Perrotta alternates his focus between Eve and Brendan, telling Brendan’s story in the first person. Brendan’s introduction to college life gives Perrotta a chance to show off his ear for youthful dialog. Brendan’s college goals are to party as much as possible, study as little as possible, and get a degree (maybe in Econ) that will allow him to earn six figures as soon as possible. As his college advisor tells him, “Good luck with that.”

Where Eve’s life has changed by becoming an empty nester and Brendan’s has changed by losing the security of living at home, a third changed life is represented in Amanda Olney, the activities director in the senior center where Eve works. Unlike Eve, who has learned to fulfill her needs by surfing porn, Amanda hooks up for one night stands that make her feel good at the time but sad the next day. The novel eventually turns into a romp as the characters pair up in expected ways to engage in unconventional acts.

Perrotta’s socially observant humor shines in his depiction of Eve’s gender studies class (an evening class that gets her out of her house) and her emerging interest in MILF pornography; the casual racism and homophobia of seniors who are stuck in the 1950s; the tribulations of middle-age dating (and the dilemma faced by women of a certain age whose standards for men exceed their ability to attract those men); and Brendan’s politically incorrect cluelessness about women.

The story’s mildly serious elements include Brendan’s autistic half-brother; Brendan’s jealousy at the relationship his father has forged with his new family; the social construction of gender; the judgmental social convention of “age appropriate” relationships; high school bullying; the inability to let go of insignificant marital grievances; and the difficulty of moving forward after making a bad decision about life.

All of that comes together in a playful novel that is fun to read even if follows a formula that leads to predictable outcomes. Characters will do something foolish, learn a lesson from their foolish behavior, and perhaps find true romance in unexpected places. The novel flirts with unconventional thought while taking few chances, but it delivers the laughter and familiar insights that Perrotta fans expect.

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