Warning: this review
of “George and Lizzie” gives the story away. Please don’t read it until after
you have read the book. Contrary views are welcome.
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If, on a lark, a bet or a dare, or perhaps because nothing
else in life much interests her, a girl decides to have sex with all the
starters on her high school football team, what can she expect out of life?
That’s 23 boys by the way – 11 on offense, 11 on defense
plus the kicker – and one a week, every week until the “Great Game” is won.
If, subsequently, a man truly loves you because he tells you
so when the two of you are having non-stop, passionate sex, he will surely
forgive you when you tell him what you have done, won’t he? And that would
presumably be even more the outcome when the two of you share an interest in
poetry.
(Poetry, in this tale, appears largely to serve as a means
for the author, Seattle literary figure Nancy Pearl, to drop a few names and
thereby establish a claim to legitimacy beyond what might otherwise be the
case. Her protagonist, obsessed with sex and “lost love” ends up as an intellectually vacuous dog
walker.)
At heart, this book is distressingly commercial in that
it turns on finding a new means – the football team caper – to exploit the age-old publishing
maxim “sex sells.” But in this instance, it is just the mere mention, ad
nauseam, of the word since nothing in these 278 pages rivals in the slightest
“Lady Chatterley’s Lover” when it comes to descriptions of how intercourse is conducted and what it is all about. Rather, episodic accounts of Lizzie’s tour through the football team
suggest that in this age of contraception-based hook ups, the sex act in and of
itself is nothing special and often downright tedious if not borderline odious.
So when Lizzie, a child of highly educated, but emotionally dispassionate
parentage, does fall for a fellow college student about whom, as it turns out,
she knows very little, she can’t help blurting out her past. He promptly dumps
her. In times past, who wouldn’t? In the hook-up age, what’s his problem?
Can Lizzie still find happiness? If she keeps certain things
to herself and the next man who comes along is insipidly uninterested in
learning much of anything about her, maybe so. But only if his mother is, well,
the mother she never had.
This book, which wallows in quotediana, is set in a Jewish
context. And, given the premise, a certain comedic aspect is, not unexpectedly,
present. For it to be a lot funnier, one suspects it should be read in a
certain tone of voice – at least for those for whom that tone is not part of
their life. Perhaps the audio book is hilarious and, well, brings the work out
to be as sweet, charming and insightful as the string of blurbs on the front and
back covers effusively suggest. But, then, have you ever bought a book
festooned with honest blurbs? Publishing is an “if you scratch my back, I’ll
scratch yours” industry and the commercial reading public clearly responds
favorably.
On the down side, one can argue that Ms Pearl is as sexist
in writing about men as many male authors are accused of being toward women.
Although thumbnail descriptions are provided of some of the football players,
they are depicted overall as a bunch of dominos, happy to fall one after
another, week in, week out and without any hesitation or misgivings to Lizzie’s
sexual enticements. That’s the way all boys are, and especially athletes,
right?
Suppose a male writer wrote a similar story in which a bunch
of female cheerleaders happily had sex, one after another, with a guy
determined to “score” them all as some sort of quest. What do you suppose
critics would say about his depiction of the nature of women and their
willingness to go along with such behavior?
One wonders, in the current age, whether Lizzie could
actually be accused of sexual harassment. The book makes it clear that, of
course, her high school sex quest could not take place without notice. Perhaps
some members of the football team weren’t that interested in having mechanical,
one-time sex with her, but feared they would be viewed by other boys as wimps,
or “worse,” if they didn’t. Thus, she could be seen as in a power situation and
taking ruthless advantage of it. Sound familiar?
The “worse” aspect is that one or more of the team could be
gay, or uncertain about his sexuality, but unready in his teens to take that on
socially, perhaps especially as a football player. By in effect forcing him to
have sex with a woman, Lizzie could be viewed as engaging in truly representable
behavior.
Ms Pearl, however, considers none of this, arguably leaving
the book far too shallow for the age in which it was written. This work is cast
as a love story, not a work of social satire.
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