The Learning Curve

March 11, 2019
The complexities of intimacy and consent are explored in this smart, engaging coming-of-age story from Berman (Perennials). Fiona Larkin and Liv Langley are best friends and codependent polar opposites in their senior year of college, though Fiona lags a semester behind, having taken time off to deal with the death of her 13-year-old sister. Fiona and Liv’s relationship is strained when both women start crushing on visiting professor Oliver Ash, despite, or perhaps because of, the rumors about his inappropriate sexual relationship with an underage student at the last school at which he taught. As the girls make halting attempts to untangle their own desires, grow closer with Oliver, and communicate honestly with each other, Oliver’s wife and five-year-old son, left behind in Berlin, deal with his absence. Things come to a head on a disastrous trip to Paris, where all three women, the novel’s narrators, collide. Readers expecting a typical love triangle won’t find one. Instead, Berman delivers a thorough and incredibly timely investigation into relationship power imbalances that’s sure to start a lot of conversations. Agent: M. Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore & Co.

March 15, 2019
Four roommates at a liberal arts college respond differently to the charisma of a married visiting professor with a murky past.There's not much good sex in this second novel from Berman (Perennials, 2017) but a fair amount of bad. As the story opens, 21-year-old Fiona Larkin, who rooms with Liv, Lula, and Marley, all seniors at Buchanan College in Pennsylvania, is advised not to spend the night with a male student who has been accused of rape. But needy Fiona sleeps with him anyway, an ugly experience, typical of the kind of poor choices she's currently making in the aftermath of her younger sister Helen's sudden death and her family's disintegration. (Fiona and Helen also featured in Perennials.) And it's not only Fiona who arrives with a deep backstory. Lula is a rich, black, half-Jewish femme lesbian, and Liv is the product of a Japanese mother and a wealthy, alcoholic American father who possibly abused her. To this mix Berman adds a catalyst, Oliver Ash, a teacher of literature and creative writing who brings to Buchanan a Holocaust background and his own history of dubious sexual conduct. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Ash's wife, Simone, is tending their 5-year-old son, Henri, while studying the sexual slavery of concentration camp prisoners. Certain themes, it becomes obvious, are the tent pegs holding up this long novel, which partly presents itself as a saga of female campus friendship but also wants to address weighty contemporary topics. The result is a restless, relatively eventless tale: Liv loses a boyfriend and develops a passing crush on Oliver; Fiona grapples with her insecurities, guilt, and a matching crush; Liv and Fiona take a doomed trip to Paris; Simone faces up to her feelings. The learning curve, it seems, is an often gloomy and incremental business.A readable but reductive and rather off-putting look at relationships, whether new or old.

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April 15, 2019
This coming-of-age campus novel explores sexual politics and dynamics among family and friends. Fiona and Liv have been best friends since freshman year at their small Pennsylvania liberal arts college. Liv helped Fiona through the death of her younger sister, but has started to question Fiona's choices?specifically those concerning boys and alcohol, no longer seen simply as by-products of grief. When handsome, acclaimed novelist Oliver arrives as a guest professor at their college?accompanied by his reputation for sleeping with an underage student?both friends find themselves drawn to him. Meanwhile, Oliver's wife, Simone, remains in Berlin with their young son and wonders what happened to her once-passionate marriage. As narration shifts among Fiona, Liv, and Simone, the women each grapple with difficult?and in Liv's case, abusive?family situations, as well as their thwarted expectations for the future. Berman's (Perennials, 2017) spot-on dialogue keeps the pages turning in a novel with little plot, making her timely second novel a good, if less-polished, read-alike for Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persuasion (2018). It should find a large readership.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)