"Tracy [Flick] was... an underdog cursed, for some reason, to be construed as an infuriating alpha who needed to be put down."

"In his sequel [to 'Election,' Tom] Perrotta elaborates on the case of Tracy’s mistaken identity. Do people (mostly men, but some women) hate her because of … misogyny? Or is it because they can’t stop themselves from punishing a person who insists, absurdly, on believing that life should be fair? Or is it because Tracy, for all her political ambitions, still fails to grasp the most important political skill of all, which is the gift of making other people feel good about themselves? In middle age, Tracy’s optimism (or naïveté) is unchanged.... Maybe it’s a credit to her integrity that she hasn’t been squashed into submission. Maybe it’s preposterous that she refuses, after all this time, to play by the rules of the game. Even if the game is rigged. Even if she shouldn’t have to play it...."

From "‘Tracy Flick Can’t Win’ Catches Up With a Hard-Luck High Achiever/Tom Perrotta’s sequel to 'Election' finds Flick, the character immortalized in film by Reese Witherspoon, reconsidering her past" by Molly Young (NYT).

If you haven't seen the movie "Election" (or read the book it was based on), this post probably won't make much sense to you. This post is for those who have.

"I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up."

"My first impulse was ... to laugh it off — it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. But I kept thinking: What if it did happen? ... I thought, I'm such a skeptic that even if it did happen, I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought that three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it. No matter what horrible thing happens in the world, the culture seems to move on."

Tom Perrotta, author of "Election" (which was made into a terrific movie) has written a novel about life after the rapture called "The Leftovers." Obviously, there's a big fiction genre on this subject, so what's interesting here is that a literary (as they say) novelist is applying his mind and methods to the Rapture.

Listen to the audio at the link. He's extremely insightful. I'm going to read the book. (Use my links please if you feel like buying it too.) Perhaps it irks you to think of a fancy "literary" writer — with access to NPR promotion — appropriating the material that "genre" writers have made their own. But if you listen to the interview, you'll see that he's not full of himself and not disrespectful toward those other writers. He seems genuinely interested in exploring the idea.