Welcome to GabFest Reeds. I'm David Plotz, one of the hosts of Slate's political GabFest.

There is almost no novelist I read as often and with as much pleasure as Tom Perada. He writes books about everyday people,

very often in New Jersey, grappling with the modest indignities and annoying conflicts of regular life.

Prada's characters are extremely human, which is to say they are generally weak in small ways

and kind and medium-sized ways. His books, which include the leftovers,

the absence teacher, little children, and Mrs. Fletcher, to name four of my favorites, are also

very funny, which is one reason why they're always becoming great TV shows and movies.

And we are here today because Tom Perada has a new novel that's a sequel to perhaps his most famous book election.

Its title is Tracy Flick Can't Win, and that title is a glorious beacon that we are about to spend

250 pages in the presence of one of the most interesting and unquestionably most important characters

in recent American culture. Tom Perado, welcome to GabFest Reeds.

Oh, hi, David.

I'm so happy to be here.

So what has happened to Tracy Flick, the hero or anti-hero of your book election,

between the end of election and the beginning of Tracy Flick can't win?

When we left Tracy in election, she had been restored to her rightful place as the president of her high school,

which her teacher had tried to deprive her of through fraud.

And it looks like she's on the way to fulfill her pretty large ambitions for herself.

She's off to Georgetown, and it seems like the election

was just a bump in the road. But like a lot of us, Tracy has found that life is full of

additional obstacles. And instead of being, you know, a congressperson or a district attorney as she had planned,

she actually finds herself an assistant principal in a public high school in New Jersey.

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