THE IMMORTAL TRACY FLICK
NO NOVELIST CAN KNOW IN ADVANCE WHAT kind of life a character might have beyond the page. When Tom Perrotta’s wry, perceptive comic novel Election was published in 1998, he couldn’t have known that the name Tracy Flick would come to signify a certain type of young—or even not so young—woman, an ambitious overachiever with a steamroller approach to conquering the world. In Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated 1999 movie version of the book, Reese Witherspoon played Tracy, a calculating senior hell-bent on becoming her school’s president, with equal parts sugar and vinegar. That portrayal burned the character’s most definitive traits deep into the public’s imagination. And since then, any intelligent, indefatigable, vocal woman who goes after what she wants—whether that’s a Hillary Clinton or a Kayleigh McEnany—has been at risk of being branded, derisively, a Tracy Flick. The name has become a kind of misogynist shorthand.
That was today, you’ll see that, even as he delights in Tracy’s most irritating quirks, his sympathy for her runs deep. He’s as attuned to her loneliness as he is to her iron will. And with his eighth novel, to be published June 7, Perrotta catches up with Tracy as an adult, rescuing her from the fate of being used as an easy symbol of, well, anything. She’s much too complex for that.
