The Learning Curve: A Novel

by Mandy Berman Narrated by Karissa Vacker

Overview

How are young*women supposed to see each other*clearly when they can't even see*themselves?*This razor-sharp novel “perfectly captures [the] power dynamics and identity issues that . . . women are forced to face.”-Marie Claire*(Best Books of the Year)

Fiona and Liv are seniors at Buchanan College, a small liberal arts school in rural Pennsylvania. Fiona, who is still struggling emotionally after the death of her younger sister, is spending her final college year sleeping with abrasive men she meets in bars. Liv is happily coupled and on the fast track to marriage with an all-American frat boy. Both of their journeys, and their friendship, will be derailed by the relationships they develop with Oliver Ash, a ruggedly good-looking visiting literature professor whose first novel was published to great success when he was twenty-six.

But now Oliver is in his early forties, with thinning hair and a checkered past, including talk of a relationship with an underage woman-a former student-at a previous teaching job. Meanwhile, Oliver's wife, Simone, is pursuing an academic research project in Berlin, raising their five-year-old son, dealing with her husband's absence, and wondering if their marriage is beyond repair.

This sly, stunning, wise-beyond-its-years novel is told from the perspectives of the three women and showcases Mandy Berman's talent for exploring the complexities of desire, friendship, identity, and power dynamics in the contemporary moment.

Praise for The Learning Curve

“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.”-The Millions

“Fiona and Liv are two best friends who became inseparable after Fiona experienced a family tragedy. Senior year of college, their lives are headed in different directions, and their differences are only highlighted by the sudden arrival of famed writer and controversial figure Oliver Ash. It's not what you think-at least, not entirely. This novel, through different perspectives, explores loss, grief, sex, friendship, power dynamics, and much more.”-Betches

“You win some, you learn some.*The Learning Curve*by Mandy Berman follows two roommates who develop relationships with a visiting professor with a questionable past. Spoiler: things get complicated.”-The Skimm

Editorial Reviews

JULY 2019 - AudioFile

Karissa Vacker elegantly gives voice to the story of three different women who are experiencing transformative—and sometimes traumatic—changes in their lives. For Liv and Fionna, it is the changes that take place after their last years at Buchanan College as they develop into adulthood during the recession of the early 2000s. For Simone, it is adjusting to infertility and her husband’s absence as he leaves her in Berlin to teach briefly at Buchanan. Vacker excels with accents, fluidly moving back and forth between French, American, and even an ambiguous combination for an American who has spent decades in Europe. The audiobook is filled with highly emotional moments, and Vacker rises to the challenge of expressing heartache and one character’s embracing of her fledgling sexuality. V.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

[A] smart, engaging coming-of-age story . . . [Mandy] Berman delivers a thorough and incredibly timely investigation into relationship power imbalances that’s sure to start a lot of conversations.”—Publishers Weekly

“Berman’s spot-on dialogue keeps the pages turning . . . timely . . . should find a large readership.”—Booklist

“Mandy Berman perfectly captures an all-too-familiar academic love triangle between college friends Fiona and Liv and their charming college professor, Oliver Ash. Berman explores power dynamics and identity issues that the women are forced to face when Ash's sketchy past reveals he’s had a relationship with a former underage student.”—Marie Claire (Best Books of 2019 to Add to Your Reading List)

JULY 2019 - AudioFile

Karissa Vacker elegantly gives voice to the story of three different women who are experiencing transformative—and sometimes traumatic—changes in their lives. For Liv and Fionna, it is the changes that take place after their last years at Buchanan College as they develop into adulthood during the recession of the early 2000s. For Simone, it is adjusting to infertility and her husband’s absence as he leaves her in Berlin to teach briefly at Buchanan. Vacker excels with accents, fluidly moving back and forth between French, American, and even an ambiguous combination for an American who has spent decades in Europe. The audiobook is filled with highly emotional moments, and Vacker rises to the challenge of expressing heartache and one character’s embracing of her fledgling sexuality. V.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2019-03-03

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171881399
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/28/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1.

Fiona drank from her bottle of Diet Coke diluted with Smirnoff and skipped ahead of her roommates when she saw the old train tracks. Already the bottle was almost empty. She finished the last gulp and chucked it in the overgrown weeds next to the out-of-service tracks. She did a cartwheel, a roundoff. She hopscotched between the rails, singing to herself—that Sleater-Kinney song Lula always blasted when they were getting ready, the last song that was in her head—as she heard the chattering of the girls somewhere behind her. She turned when the voices got close.

“Play with me!” Fiona called to them.

They laughed gamely, humored her for a minute, Lula lighting a cigarette, Marley sipping from her own soda bottle, Liv standing in silence with her arms crossed while Fiona spun, flipped, skipped. When Lula was done smoking, she crushed the butt into the ground and made for the sidewalk. Truckstop was a few more blocks that way. Marley stood and followed. Only Liv waited.

“Fiona,” she said. “Time to go.”

Fiona did more cartwheels. Her face felt delectably warm, her body as light and bright as if sunshine had been pumped directly into it. She looked up, dizzied, to see that Liv had also walked ahead. She ran, out of breath, toward her friend. “My baby loves me, I’m so hungry!” She sang loudly into Liv’s ear. “Hunger makes me a modern girl!”

“Fiona, stop it,” Liv said, turning her head away from the singing. She looked down at Fiona’s empty hands. “You finished that drink already?” She said this less like a question and more like an expectation.

There it was: that air of judgment had been emanating off Liv all month like a bad smell. As if getting a boyfriend this summer suddenly made her the most virtuous of them all. But instead of delving into the shame, Fiona felt it sweetly rolling off her as if she were a duck emerging from the water.

“It’s Saturday night, Livvy Loo,” she said, kissing her friend on the cheek. She ran ahead to Marley and Lula, knowing that Liv was too afraid to walk in these parts of town alone, and would quickly be forced to follow.

Buchanan College, which came in at number nineteen on the 2008 U.S. News & World Report list of Best Liberal Arts Colleges, was in a small city in central Pennsylvania with a motley population. Besides the college community—rich liberal arts kids, the dippy professors and their mildly rebellious offspring—there was a healthy mix of townies, Amish people, working-class families, gang members, meth heads, artists who couldn’t afford Philadelphia, and then, in the suburbs just outside, staunch, often religious conservatives in their gated communities. Truckstop, in a more desolate area of town—about a fifteen-minute walk from campus and ten minutes from their house—hosted an array of these groups on any given night, meaning the atmosphere was never dull. Sorority girls bought low-grade cocaine and snorted it with the dealers in the bathrooms, the floors slick from leaky plumbing, both parties leaving behind tracks of mud from the dirt-crusted soles of their high heels and their Timberlands. Lacrosse players took townies home, got them pregnant, paid for their abortions. Most recently, the quarterback of the football team, a celebrity on campus for bringing the once terrible team to more victorious seasons than they’d had in decades, had drunkenly failed to leave a tip on a pitcher of Bud Light for himself and his teammates; the bartender, all yellow teeth and shifty eyes, called the quarterback a racial slur under his breath, and a white teammate heard it and punched the bartender in the nose so hard that the crunch of his bones stopped the bar cold. Rumor spread that blood splattered directly into the pitcher, and the teammate had poured the bloody beer straight down his gullet on his way to being thrown out.

Truckstop was surprisingly hard on IDs, and there was always an unsmiling bouncer standing out front who looked more fit for a dance club than for the sticky dive bar inside. What a privilege to all be twenty-one, finally! To not have to hold breaths as Fiona, who had had her birthday in July, pulled out another fake ID to be inevitably taken from her. At some point last spring, Marley, Lula, and Liv had started playing rock-paper-scissors over who would have to accompany Fiona to a frat or loft party, lousy with underclassmen, while the other two stayed at the bar. It wasn’t a nice bar—none of them believed otherwise—but it was a bar, which kept away the pimply eighteen-year-old pledges, the freshmen field hockey players who already thought they were such hot shit, and that in itself was a privilege.

Inside, they ordered their five-dollar vodka tonics, which the bartender, muscle-T’d and tribal-tattooed, handed to them in plastic cups. Lula put her card down, and told the bartender to keep the tab open.

“To senior year!” Fiona said, as if the others might forget that she was a semester behind them.

“To senior year,” they all said back, and every time she was grateful for their kindness in not clarifying the truth.

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