Tracy Flick Can’t Win, Tom Perotta’s return to the world of the darkly comic Election, which spawned the cult hit film of the same name, is engrossing, but too many point of view chapters from other characters spoil the soup.

Indefatigable achiever, throat-cutter and go-getter Tracy Flick – who back in high school would do anything to become class president – has grown up and hit the wall. Sure, she went to Georgetown and got a doctorate, but instead of achieving some high scholastic or political honor she’s an assistant principal at a suburban New Jersey high school. She is a single mother to a ten-year-old daughter named Sophia – a popular soccer player —  but otherwise doesn’t have much to show for all of the years she’s put into life at Green Meadow High School. Reckoning with things that took place during her own youth with the advent of the #metoo movement, she tries to keep the kids at her school from experiencing inferior education or horrifying abuse.  Even worse, she misses her mother, who has passed away from multiple sclerosis.

Tracy’s ambition is sparked back to life when the school’s principal, Jack Weede, declares he’s going to retire and take to traveling America in an RV with his wife (but in reality he’s trying to get out and save his pension before any sexual assault or harassment accusations land on his spotless reputation).  Trying to stack up allies who will win her the plumb role as principal, Tracy finds herself serving on the selection committee for the school’s hall of fame.  The majority of the committee – acting under the influence of Kyle Dorfman, whose Flappy Bird-like app made him a millionaire –  decides to induct the much-married Vito Falcone. Vito is the only really famous alumni from the school, a football player who had a brief and undistinguished NFL career before suffering from CTE, flaming out into alcoholism and becoming a high school football coach. Tracy is, in a word, appalled – especially because she’s been dating Kyle  (who is cheating on her with another woman.)  Dorfman worships Falcone, and his money is driving this endeavor, and Tracy has to please Dorfman to get the influence she needs to get the principal job.  While waiting to interview for the position, she tries to get in the good books of a PTA mom who might have it in for her, too. Is Tracy headed for the job, or is she on a collision course with another disaster?

Tracy Flick Can’t Win suffers from one simple problem – it tries to pack way too many points of view into its slim 272 pages.  There are a grand total of nine of them.  The story is divided between Tracy, Kyle, Vito, Weede, “Desk Diane”  – a secretary whose long-term affair with Weede ends after his wife survives her cancer diagnosis – and Glenn, who is looking for revenge on one of the potential inductees.  We get several PoV  chapters which are utterly immaterial to the story from Lily Chu – a more vulnerable and social justice-driven high achiever who’s vice president of the Student Counsel – and Nate, the Student Counsel’s president and wannabe director, who develops a crush on one of the possible hall of fame alumni, and who runs a successful ASMR channel.  I liked Lily and Nate, and especially Lily’s sweet romance with Clem, but I didn’t need to know them this well.  Most of these points of view don’t add to the book and in fact stymie the reader’s progress.  I would’ve narrowed the field down to Tracy and maybe Vito, just to be sure there’s enough variety in the narrative without splitting the story’s atom into forty thousand this-is-going-nowhere narrative parts.  I mean, did “Desk Diane” really need to be fleshed out?

On the other hand, the way Tracy has grown up is both fitting in regard to Parotta’s take on the character (in the book version of Election she ends up making amends with Jim McCallister, the teacher who abhorred Tracy’s mercenary actions and tries to intervene to keep her from becoming class president; there are no senators and limos for the book version of Tracy and McCallister isn’t even mentioned in the new book) and to the sort of young woman Tracy was in both the movie and book.  Tracy is the kind of person who always wants more than the world could ever offer her; a black hole of ambition who was shooting straight to the top, but even with all of her drive could never get there.  She was always destined to go up in a bitter ball of flaming resentment and paranoia and end up as either a PTA mom or a private school principal.  This is close enough.  Parrotta manages to do the somewhat impossible here – make Tracy an enjoyable character worth rooting for, if only because everyone surrounding her is so corrupt.

The rest of the book – part blackly comic mediation on the character’s past sins, part bitter recrimination for the world – is a mixed up bag of the good, the funny and the sad.  Tracy Flick Can’t Win eventually belies its’ own title, but at what cost to us all?

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