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| (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