Book: George and Lizzie

Our local world-famous book reviewer Nancy Pearl -- whom I have known OF for decades and met once or twice through mutual friends -- has written her first novel at age seventy-something.

She says it more-or-less came into her mind fully formed and she couldn't get it out of her head so she had to write it down.  She said many of the sentences, which sounded brilliant in her head, looked dumb and lame on her computer screen, so she had to spend months finding just the right words.  Very carefully written, in other words, by a person with a critic's sensibilities.

I knew I had to give it a try.  So far it's very good.

It's about an old married couple and what they have to do to accommodate each other.

Nancy's been married for 51 years.  She knows her subject.

Halfway through. It has been less about the old married couple than about the woman’s checkered past before she met her husband. Oh well, it’s engagingly written.

Though it has a curious prejudice: the main characters talk a lot about what books they’ve read, and what books they recommend to each other and to strangers.

I am reminded of Seinfeld. Everyone’s lives are brimming with activity, but nothing anyone does is particularly noteworthy.

Real life is like that. You don’t expect novels and TV shows and movies to be like that.

In the final analysis the constant harping on which books the characters were reading, which books they gifted each other, which books their lives reminded them of, became an annoyance. Too many times.

Nancy Pearl, in the voice of her protagonist Lizzie, is dismissive of pulp fiction. She thinks it’s beneath her to read a popular novel and favors heavy foreign or ancient works instead.

But “a popular novel” is exactly what she’s written here. It reminds me of nothing more than Janet Evanovich.

Ironic.

My wife and I have different taste in books. There's maybe a ten percent overlap in what we read. But we have never had a problem with it. I cannot understand why she reads so much history, and she doesn't understand why I don't find it fascinating. I read political treatises and she thinks that is unbelievably boring (and she is often right). But, to us, this is a meaningless matter to which we never give any thought.

I can't believe anyone would believe a book about this would be of any interest to those not in the book business at some level.

Here's the review I posted on Amazon -- it captures the nature of the book rather well I think.

Quote :

Nancy Pearl’s first novel in seventy-some odd years is obviously a labor of love, love of books that is. The characters spend an inordinate amount of time talking about their favorite books, discussing which books they’d recommend under which circumstances to family, friends and strangers. These discussions bear the overwhelming weight of life-changing potential. The characters’ world — like Pearl’s — orbits entirely around literature.

Outside of that their lives are pretty plebeian. Like “Seinfeld” they are always occupied with something-or-other but never anything of consequence. They go to parties, they go shopping, they talk “of things that matter, of words that must be said, can analysis be worthwhile, is the theater really dead.” Then they go off to look for America.

Except for Lizzie’s secret, which she bears like a scarlet A. She spends the bulk of the book pining for a lost boyfriend, unable to face the obvious that he’s moved on. Like Stephanie Plum in the Janet Evanovich books Pearl probably dismisses as “not literature,” Jack becomes Lizzie’s Ranger — much to the annoyance of the reader.

I don’t know if there’s a peculiar myopia, a dystopian prejudice embodied in the writings of literatureholics. It seems like the relative sizes of real-life events and events read about in books change places, to where nothing in life matters unless it makes a good story.