Tracy Flick, the ambitious but unlucky protagonist of Tom Perrotta's 1998 novel Election (and the 1999 movie adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon), is back and still striving in Tracy Flick Can't Win. Familiarity with Election can't hurt, but isn't necessary to follow this next installment. Perrotta (The Leftovers; Little Children) serves up his signature black comedy and shrewd wit in an expertly paced novel of great cleverness and charm. The title character is now 40-ish and working as assistant principal at Green Meadow High School, in a shabby-idyllic New Jersey suburb. Life hasn't turned out as Tracy had hoped. She left law school to care for her beloved mother, whose death 10 years ago still leaves a gaping hole. Instead of being a high-powered attorney on a rocket-like political trajectory, she serves as the hardworking second-in-command at an unremarkable public school whose football team disappoints everyone in town (except Tracy, who couldn't care less). Then Principal Jack Weede announces his pending retirement, and it might finally be Tracy's time to shine. But of course, nothing's ever easy.

Kyle Dorfman, one of the town's most successful alumni (he got rich off a virtual pet app) returns with the idea of putting together a Green Meadow High School Hall of Fame. He is also the new school board president, and therefore someone Tracy needs in her corner, but it's not clear where his loyalties really lie (aside from with Kyle). The first meeting of the Hall of Fame selection committee immediately turns sour: the obvious candidate turns out to be a former star quarterback, and Tracy's seen this routine before.

Tracy Flick Can't Win is timely. It opens with a review of the #metoo era and headlines filled with "one powerful man after another toppled from his pedestal, exposed as a sexual predator," which gives Tracy unpleasant memories of high school: "It was ancient history, a brief misguided affair--that's the wrong word, I know, but it's the one I've always used--with my sophomore English teacher, a few regrettable weeks of my teenage life." Tracy sees the world changing around her but hasn't entirely figured out her own version of it yet.

This adult Tracy Flick is vulnerable, socially awkward, frustrated and disillusioned. "My mother had been wrong: fame wasn't a reward for your hard work. It was a lottery, pure dumb luck, and it didn't matter anyway, not in the long run." She's still ambitious but worried it may be too late for her; she's been passed over for promotions, and not completing law school still smarts. Her romantic life becomes needlessly complicated when her supposed catch of a surgeon boyfriend turns clingy. Baking a cake for her daughter's 11th birthday gives her a chance to reflect on their mother-daughter relationship, which disappoints her, by contrast to her very close bond with her own late mother. The maturing Tracy has taken up a meditation practice for her blood pressure, and is working to navigate the nuances and challenges of a life less sparkly and more complicated than the one she'd intended to lead.

One of Perrotta's talents is obviously forming character. Tracy is delightfully complex; Principal Weede has secrets of his own, and a touching vulnerability as well as some less admirable qualities. Kyle is not well liked, but his attempts to compensate offer comic opportunities. The aging star quarterback nominated for the Hall of Fame, Vito Falcone, is now a recovering alcoholic working on making amends, his process by turns pitiful and hilarious. And the high school's much-loved, longtime front desk lady, Diane, is perhaps the novel's most rewarding surprise.

Chapters shift in perspective, mainly between Tracy Flick, Jack Weede and Kyle Dorfman, whose first-person voices are joined by those of the two students who serve on the selection committee. (It's déjà vu for Tracy when these are an overachieving but under-recognized girl and an affable but less impressive boy who'd beaten her out for Student Council president.) Third-person chapters feature a few other characters, like Vito Falcone and Front Desk Diane. In contrast to Tracy's justified bitterness, we get other perspectives: "The truth is, we're all prisoners of our historical context. Anybody who says morality is absolute, that right and wrong don't change over time, you know what? They just haven't lived long enough." These points of view paint Green Meadow--and Tracy--in different lights, and allow Perrotta's comedic zings to shine. Tracy Flick Can't Win is many things: of-the-moment cultural criticism, a darkly comic drama of human relationships in suburbia, a moving sendup and a novel of racing momentum. By its end, Tracy is headed either for the triumph she's been seeking since she was a high school student, or a meltdown the likes of which Green Meadow has never seen--or maybe both.

Perrotta's classic combination of insight, humor and empathy is perhaps perfected in Tracy Flick Can't Win. This novel has something for both the reader with a gimlet eye on the real world and the reader seeking an escape from it. --Julia Kastner

(photo: Beowulf Sheehan)

Tom Perrotta is the bestselling author of 10 works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into critically acclaimed movies, and The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher, which were adapted into HBO series. His work has been translated into numerous languages. Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and lives outside Boston.

Do readers need to know Election to follow or to enjoy this novel?

I don't think of it as a straightforward sequel. Tracy tells you all the facts that you absolutely need to know. The two books are in a dialog, and reading them together can tell you a lot about the intervening years, not just for Tracy but for the country as a whole. Election was a bit ahead of its time in its focus on the relationship that Tracy has with her teacher, disputed elections, the teacher who abuses his power--a lot of things that were undercurrents back then and now they're mainstream discussions. The two books are bookends of all that social history.

How do you explain that prescience?

There are many reasons why Tracy has persisted as a character. Reese Witherspoon put her on the map with that amazing performance. But, weirdly, I think when I wrote that book--and maybe I'm wrong and somebody can give another example--but I think there weren't novels about women politicians. (There were of course women politicians.) As a novelist I think I got in early on that. Then it became this memorable movie, and as a result, when journalists wanted to use an example in popular culture for a certain kind of woman politician, Tracy would come up. Over all those years she was compared to Hillary Clinton, to Sarah Palin, to Kirsten Gillibrand, Elise Stefanik; she just became a kind of catch-all for an ambitious woman. But the idea of an unapologetically ambitious woman--she's young, but she has a goal, and she's not afraid to express it. Her mother has raised her to pursue it. And that felt like something new in the world.

It felt like the culture wasn't done with Tracy. I was really intrigued by a couple of high-profile essays kind of reckoning with her legacy--Rebecca Traister wrote one and A.O. Scott wrote another--seeing her in the light of #metoo, and realizing that the first wave of interpretations that saw Tracy as this kind of ego-monster came from a sexist lens. And suddenly this character was being interpreted from a whole new perspective. It was fascinating for me. When #metoo really came into being I was thinking about how I had portrayed Tracy in the first book, especially in relationship to her "affair" and her sense of her own sexual agency. I saw so many women in these stories who said "I had an affair with a teacher, and at the time I felt that it was my choice, it was all consensual... this was almost part of a feminist agenda, that I can pursue what I want. I see myself as an independent sexual agent in the world. Then 20-30 years later, wait a second, maybe the power imbalance was more complicated and nefarious than I believed." And I wondered if Tracy would undergo a similar revision of her past. We all revise our pasts as we get older. We simplify, we turn it into a story that we can live with. And I think one of the things that #metoo did was it forced a lot of people to revisit their pasts and say, was that what I thought it was? Do I have a narrative that can accommodate it; was I deceiving myself? Tracy is reacting and I am reacting to an incident that happened, fictionally, 25 years ago or so, and looking at it in this new light, through this relatively fresh cultural lens.

Did you always know Tracy would be back?

No, and I'm glad that it took this long. Funny thing is, when I wrote Election, Tracy was not the central character. When I started, I knew that it was about Mr. M, and the way I conceived the book was a brother and sister running against each other for class president. Tracy was there as the favorite. That happens sometimes: you write a character that seems smallish, and they take on a kind of energy that you didn't expect. And then Reese Witherspoon took that energy and ran with it. I felt like the culture took that character over, beyond the pages.

Writing this "sequel" was an accident, again. I started with the story of Vito Falcone. He also relates to #metoo: these formerly powerful male figures who had this sense of entitlement that was given to them in those past years, the football heroes. Now he's coming back to his high school to be honored, but he himself is a wreck of a man. That was the idea, to examine the wreckage of toxic masculinity. But I kept wanting to write it in the style of Election, with multiple perspectives, short sections. And I really resisted. I thought, why am I quoting myself by stealing this form that I used back in the '90s? It felt like I wasn't letting the book have its own shape, but I could not write it any other way. I started to see Tracy Flick. Why does Tracy want to be part of this book? And once I understood--oh, she's at this high school, she's part of it, she's horrified that they're going to honor this guy, because he brings back all these triggering memories of her own high school, where guys like this outshone her when they had no right to. And that's when I had the book. But I didn't know it for some time, and I was very annoyed by my inability to understand why I wanted to write it this way. It was as if Tracy was raising her hand saying, put me in!

Is humor a gift you're born with, or can the rest of us learn it?

This one puzzles me. When I write, I am funny, but when I'm being myself, I'm not so funny. I tend toward serious. It's enabled by the freedom of writing. I feel like a lot of funny people are really quick, and I'm not so quick. I do have a highly developed sense of absurdity. The reason I resist the word satire is that it suggests that the writer and the audience are looking down on the characters, saying aren't these people ridiculous? Aren't they deeply flawed? We superior beings, we're almost like gods looking down at the mortals. And I never feel that way. I always feel that my characters are as troubled as I am and trying as hard as I am. And I don't want my audience to look down on the characters. I want them to feel, I have that burning ambition in me. Or I remember what it feels like, or what it's like to make a bad mistake. That is really the level I want: to engage my characters as equals, as people who are struggling with some of the same things that I'm struggling with. And I hope my audience reads them in the same way, and that's it. That can be very funny. People can be very funny in that they never live up to their ideals; they lie and they cheat but they want to be better. Our imperfections can be disappointing, can be troubling, but they can be very funny. I had a friend years ago who said he thought I was very Catholic, in the sense that I believed people are sinners, and I didn't think it disqualified them from love. It's an outlook. --Julia Kastner