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2022 reads, #33. I'm a fan of Tom Perrotta, and have read now almost every novel he's ever written, even though I admit that he's also inconsistent (The Abstinence Teacher and Mrs. Fletcher will almost never be revisited by future readers again, I think), and that it's honest to say that most of the TV and movie adaptations of his work (including Little Children and The Leftovers, among others) are actually better than the books themselves, because Perrotta is great at setting things up but only so-so at knocking them down. So that's why I was excited to hear that he'd recently written a sequel to his 1998 Election, still to this day one of the best books of his career, in which through a perfect storm of dysfunctional adults with hidden agendas and overly ambitious, unlikable teens (including our crafty anti-hero Tracy Flick, who Reese Witherspoon played to such perfection in the movie adaptation), the boring election of a high-school class president in suburban New Jersey blows up into an attention-causing disaster that ruins several people's lives and ends several people's careers.

A lot of people don't realize this, but despite the movie version (adapted and directed by the now famous Alexander Payne) being a dark comedy, the novel it's based on is actually a quite serious drama, as are surprisingly almost all of Perrotta's books, despite all the adaptations being known in one way or another for their dry wit; and so should you be prepared as well for this newest, because despite the cutesy title and cover art, this is a sometimes wrist-slashingly depressive look at late middle-age, the first moment of most people's lives when it suddenly dawns on them that it's simply too late to achieve some of their childhood dreams before they likely die, and react in various ways but always with a deep undercurrent of sadness to them all. That's certainly the case with Flick, who's now in her forties in this contemporarily-set sequel, who as people remember from the previous novel had been ambitious as hell all the way through her early twenties, before suddenly her mother got sick and she was forced back home halfway through law school, never to finish her degree but instead getting started at a temp agency when she first arrived back home, which then transitioned into a substitute teacher job, then a full-time job, then her bare rise through the ranks to a soul-beaten perpetual assistant principal now.

LIke the previous novel, there's an election going on here too, and in fact not one but two -- not only for a new principal, which Flick is a kinda-sorta-favorite for (no one's forgotten how haughty and ambitious she had been when younger), but then also choosing the first honorees for the high school's brand-new "Hall of Fame" program, the brainchild of a tech-industry millionaire who's also moved back to his hometown (although by "tech industry," I mean on a lark he invented one of those goofy "Angry Birds" type useless phone apps that suddenly becomes a viral hit and is bought by tens of millions of people before then being forgotten again a year later), who is dismayed that the town voted down the latest bond issue to fund their rapidly falling apart local high school, so self-funds this flashy, high-profile Hall of Fame idea to try to get local citizens worked up and excited about getting their school back in order. And why didn't he just fund the actual school's real issues with this Hall of Fame money? Well, you never ask those kinds of questions in a Perrotta novel, because the answer's always the same -- because ultimately this lucky app lottery winner is doing it all for himself and his own personal glory, and wants it to be as showy a personal project as it possibly can, exactly like how the first thing he does when moving back to his hometown is buy a plot of land on the rich side of town and then build a Postmodernist monstrosity of a mansion, three Jenga-like boxes stacked haphazardly on top of each other, the various ways it's reacted to and used by the various characters becoming this lovely central hook off which to hang the plot that spins around it.

Not-so-spoiler alert: The two goofiest white bros in town become the favorites for both elections, which is kind of Perrotta's point here, that even in our Woke age it's these buffoons who still largely end up on top in most situations. But that's not the point anyway here, but rather to use this situation to peek behind the curtain of all these forties-to-sixties characters and see the deeply broken spirits behind all of them, the crushing pain of being in these blandly okay places in their lives and having lost all ambition or energy to want more than that anymore. As Flick says to herself at one point, "You failed. You did the best you could. Both those statements were true, and I accepted the mixed verdict. I was an adult; I had no choice. But I desperately wanted to go back in time, to find the girl I used to be and tell her how sorry I was for letting her down, that fierce young woman who never had a chance, the one who got crushed." That's essentially this book in a nutshell, whether that's the star quarterback now humiliatingly revisiting all the people he'd been a dick to while an alcoholic his twenties, or the milquetoast nobody who worked the school's front desk for 30 years, is about to retire, and is asking herself what it was all for, anyway?

As in the best of his books, Perrotta asks these kinds of deeply existential questions within these bland environments of quiet suburbs and their long-suffering citizens; so in this, you can think of Perrotta at his best as sorta Updike Lite, easier to digest and not quite as cruel but still in that wheelhouse of Mad Men-esque "5:47 to Ossining" territory, and of course with both the authors owing a big bow of respect to John Cheever who essentially invented the genre. If you're going to like Perrotta, that's the spirit in which to read him, as the logical end game of the arrow begun by Cheever and pushed along by '70s and '80s Postmodernism, understanding that he's not really telling any new stories in any of his agreeable, easy-to-read novels, but doing a great job at telling updated versions of stories you already know. As always with him, today's book comes recommended in that specific spirit.