George and Lizzie

July 24, 2017
Librarian and NPR commentator Pearl has made a living recommending great books; in this debut novel about love, regret, and forgiveness she tries her hand at fiction with mixed results. Her heroine is Lizzie, the only child of two famous but emotionally distant psychologists who use Lizzie to test their theories. Against the backdrop of this loveless childhood, Lizzie embarks on the “Great Game” of sleeping with every starter on the high school football team, but her attention-seeking efforts fail to generate anything more than negative voices in her head and a deep-seated self-hatred. When later her lust-filled relationship with college classmate Jack falls apart, Lizzie worries the Great Game is to blame. In steps George, a dental student with a “marshmallow” heart who wants nothing more than to make Lizzie happy. But even after Lizzie and George say “I do,” Lizzie finds herself pining for Jack. Pearl doesn’t give readers enough time to witness the deepening of George and Lizzie’s relationship for it to be convincing, and at times the characters seem out of step with the realities of 1990s-era early adulthood. Still, the path George and Lizzie’s relationship takes toward wholeness points to truths about the way people self-sabotage, the complexity of love, and the importance of being able to let go of the past.

July 1, 2017
He's a celebrity dentist and a prince of a guy; she's a damaged, brilliant young woman obsessed with someone she dated in college. Can their marriage be saved?Lizzie Bultmann, the protagonist of celebrity librarian Pearl's (Book Lust To Go, 2010, etc.) debut novel, is the daughter of a pair of famous behavioral psychologists at the University of Michigan who raised her not as a loved one but as an experimental subject. Partly because she wants them to "wake...up enough to finally see her" for the extremely unhappy person she is, and also because she somehow thinks it will be fun, she embarks on what she calls The Great Game, in which she has sex with all 23 starters of her high school football team, one per week. Originally, she and her best friend were going to each take half, but the other girl was just joking around. Lizzie grimly executes her plan, resulting in a permanent "post-game show" in her head in which voices berate her for "what a terrible person she'd been and always would be." The next time Lizzie has sex it is with Jack, a boy she falls madly in love with at college; they bond over their mutual admiration for the poetry of A.E. Housman. (Lots of fun literary references in this book, including a shoutout to Julie Hecht.) Two months later, Jack finds out about The Great Game thanks to an article her evil parents have published in Psychology Today. He disappears forthwith. Though Lizzie begins dating and ultimately marries a boy named George Goldrosen, she never stops thinking about Jack and never loves George. George knows she is profoundly depressed and doesn't really love him, though he doesn't know about either Jack or The Great Game--in any case, he's so smitten he just doesn't care. As he's busy becoming a famous dentist, Lizzie spends her days in the library, looking through phone books trying to find Jack. This doesn't seem very believable, but neither does the football team thing or the mad scientist parents or even the marriage. There's a fairy-tale quality to the narrative voice and extreme premises of this book that some will find endearing.

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April 15, 2017

America's best-known librarian now offers her first novel. The slightly skewed husband and wife of the title approach marriage differently owing to their very different upbringings. George comes from a warm, boisterous family, while only-child Lizzie seemed less a loved daughter than the pet project of two psychologist parents. With an eight-city tour.

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