Election &
Tracy Flick Can't Win

“Election” by Tom Perotta, 1998, Putnam Publishing Group, 200 pages
“Tracy Flick Can’t Win” by Tom Perotta, 2022, Scribner, 272 pages
Reviewwed by Ted Streuli, January 31, 2023

When it comes to book reviews, you don’t get a double feature very often. Yet here it is. Lucky you.

Sure, “Election” and “Tracy Flick Can’t Win” are stand-alone novels that Tom Perotta published 24 years apart, but there is really no way to talk about the second without discussing the first.

That would be like, well, there’s no reasonable comparison. Sorry for getting your hopes up. The easy parallel would be to say you can’t discuss “Return of the Jedi” without discussing “Star Wars,” but the analogy fails because while “Star Wars” was amazing, “Return of the Jedi” was still pretty good.

“Election” is an amusing story about suburban New Jersey high schoolers — students, teachers and administrators included — embroiled in a student body presidential election. Tracy Flick is the clear frontrunner, the clichéd, beautiful over-achiever who has her life well planned. She got elected to progressively higher student body positions, worked on the yearbook, got the right grades, and adding the president’s title to her Ivy League applications will cement her acceptance.

From there, it’s on to law school, perhaps a stint as the attorney general, then the White House.

We hate her already.

Her plans hit a bump, though, when the idealist faculty member, Jim McAllister, persuades good-natured, good-looking, popular jock Paul Warren to enter the race. That annoys Paul’s younger sister, Tammi, who enters the race and runs on a platform of pure apathy. Conniving, back-stabbing and hijinks ensue.

“Election” is part comedy, part coming-of-age and part awkward look at the awkwardness of adolescence. Perotta is flat-out funny in places, and the characters send us straight back to the Sophomore Soirée or whatever thing they did at your less-pretentious high school. He describes the Winwood High principal through Tracy’s eyes:

As far as I could tell, he earned his hundred thousand a year by wandering the hallway with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, smiling at the pretty girls and scowling at the boys who didn’t play sports. Somebody should have stuck a broom in his hand and made him an honest man.

One can’t have a cast of struggling high schoolers without making them struggle with sex any more than one can write a Western without any horses. Perotta delivers a scene in which we learn that the male teachers have a lot of very inappropriate thoughts about their female students.

And perfect Tracy seduces Mr. Dexter, a teacher who becomes obsessed with her to the detriment of his career, his marriage and his dignity.

All of that seems okayish in context. There’s a sense, reading it in 2023, that those were different times, the era of Bill and Monica and the blue dress, Heidi Fleiss’ notebook, Charles favoring Camilla over the world’s princess, and Pamela and Tommy Lee’s tape. A 15-year-old girl with a cute ass seducing a teacher seems almost expected.

It’s not, of course. The teacher has all the power and all the influence, which is one of the things Tracy comes to grips with when we next see her in “Tracy Flick Can’t Win.” She didn’t make it to the White House. Twenty-four years later she’s still campaigning, now the heir apparent who will move from the assistant principal’s job to the top slot at Green Meadow High School.

She’s not bitter about her affair with Mr. Dexter; when others bring it up, she insists that it was OK, that she initiated it, that he didn’t really do anything wrong. But we hear strongly from other characters that she’s the victim. As much as “Election” reflected its time of leaked sex tapes and scandals that surprised no one, the belated sequel goes out of its way to mirror today’s carousel of disgraced teachers.

Perotta doesn’t stop with that. He also takes on gun violence and football-induced concussions, plus he pokes fun at our apathy. The trouble is the sex. Perotta needles us for the way we want to watch “Mad Men” and shrug off our boys-will-be-boys mentality as a relic of grandpa’s day, the way we want to idolize athletes while ignoring the crushing long-term health problems that lurk, the way we still would rather put in charge an incompetent man than a competent woman.

But “Tracy Flick Can’t Win” suffers with some literary version of so-called white guilt. Perotta seems to be apologizing, not just for the way his characters behave, but for all 200 pages of “Election.” It’s as though he reread the 1998 novel, was ashamed of treating Mr. Dexter and Tracy’s relationship too cavalierly, and needed 272 pages to try to make amends in 2022.

Both books are dark and funny and help us see how silly we were and how silly we remain. Both are worth a read; they’re quick and fun. But beware: Perotta delivers a lot of fun in “Election.” And he takes a chunk of it away in “Tracy Flick Can’t Win.”