Tracy Flick is back and she's tired of losing

Tracy Flick Can't Win Tom Perrotta Scribner

When we last saw Tracy Flick, the ambitious high school girl in Tom Perrotta's 1998 novel, Election, she'd been named student body president. But hers was a soiled victory that came only after a humiliating recount.

“Despite the actual outcome of the election, I still felt like a loser,” Tracy says. When the first — fraudulent — results were announced, “I stood up by mistake and was laughed at by hundreds of people. There was something true in that laughter, a truth I felt would taint every good thing in my life for years to come.”

She's right: There was something true in that laughter, but it's something true about us, not her. Ever since Reese Witherspoon immortalized Tracy in the movie version of Election, determined women have been labelled Tracy Flicks. It's a handy slur to disparage female ambition, to laugh off the efforts of smart women who try too hard.

Now, Tracy is back in Perrotta's ruminative sequel, Tracy Flick Can't Win. Like Hillary Clinton, Tracy never fulfilled her plans to become president of the United States. She never came close. When her mother developed multiple sclerosis, Tracy dropped out of Georgetown Law School to care for her. It was a loving and dutiful decision — the kind that flunks the test for American success.

At the start of Tracy Flick Can't Win, her youthful dreams look like dress-up clothes abandoned in the attic. The idea that she was once destined for “something amazing” seems quaint. These days, Tracy is a single mother raising a 10-year-old daughter working as an assistant principal.

Perrotta has cleverly designed this sequel to re-create the tragicomedy of Election in a new era. Tracy Flick Can't Win opens in the midst of the #Metoo movement.

Moving through short chapters, mostly narrated in the first person by a rotating collection of characters, Tracy Flick Can't Win offers a sobering vision of lives marinating in regret.

For the moment, Perrotta has reclaimed the name Tracy Flick from the bucket of misogynist punchlines.