Book Review: Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler

I was immediately intrigued by the cover of the novel Rosenfeld, by Maya Kessler. It was designed to look like a movie rating, with the capital letter “R”, and the subtitle A Grown-Up Love Story for Grown-Ups. Although I’ll read an occasional romance novel (typically when it’s centered around a holiday), I do prefer the complicated, messy stories that are more often categorized as literary fiction, with no happy ending promised. This book definitely falls into that latter category. This is most certainly a book for grown-ups, although not quite as shocking as the blurbs may suggest.

Plot Summary

Noa doesn’t have much on the horizon; she’s stuck in a low level job, and hasn’t spoken to her mother in decades. We meet her at a friends wedding after she’s just shown a quick little movie she’s made as a wedding present, and the guests are impressed. Most specifically, two men, friends of the groom’s mother, are most impressed and request to meet the director. Noa is dragged to their table and there meets the CEO of a biotech company, Teddy Rosenfeld. He’s a 55 to her 36, but they are immediately interested in one another, starting a twisted, emotionally fraught, but highly sexual relationship that seems to frustrate both of them. But It’s not just their age and life circumstances that separate them; Noa ends up getting a job at Teddy’s company, hired to work with their marketing department and produce a film that will better represent their technology. Power struggles ensue! And as Noa and Teddy become closer, they discover the odd quirks of one another that inspire a mixture of fury and resentment in one another. For instance Teddy brings Noa to his dead mother’s apartment, completely untouched since she died over 10 years ago. When Teddy discovers that Noa hasn’t spoken to her own mother for so long, he intervenes. Drama ensues! The baggage each other holds seems to at once disgust, and attract them to one another, and the entire book is told from Noa’s perspective as she runs hot and cold on Teddy.

My Thoughts

The promotional material for this book proclaims it as “too literary to be erotic, and too erotic to be literary”. It’s definitely literary in that the plot is fairly simple and straightforward. A few challenges come up for Teddy and Noa, but they certainly aren’t insurmountable or shocking in any way. There isn’t a whole lot of sex either. There’s a few scenes but it doesn’t last for pages, and compared to another romance I read earlier this year, it’s quite tame. Something that makes this book believable, if not relatable, is the fact that the characters aren’t particularly attractive, and Noa has lots of weird, conflicting emotions about this relationship. She’s unsure of where she stands and her complaints would sound familiar to most women. It’s nothing you haven’t already seen in a Sex in the City episode, or heard over Mimosas at your local brunch spot. They fight like cats and dogs, but I think many couples do, we just rarely get such an intimate glimpse inside it, which this book offers us.

I should clarify that Noa herself is not relatable; she swings from depressive to wildly angry in a moment, yet despite this, I found her entertaining to read. She spends the majority of the novel stomping around angry at Teddy, both physically, and mentally. Below is a scene in which she’s driving to see family:

“I drive through the city hating everyone around me. The pedestrian light is red, but some skinny lady’s crossing the road in a rush, blatantly disobeying traffic laws. Why would she do that? The man she was standing with keeps on waiting for the light to turn green. I think I know what’s going on here: she decided to cross so she told him, Come on, and he didn’t, but she crossed nevertheless; no, they talked about something and he pissed her off so badly that she preferred to risk her own life rather than stay standing next to him. She’s right!”

-p.247 of Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler, ARC edition

I can’t quite pinpoint why I enjoyed this book. Even though Noa and Teddy were awful most of the time, I was still completely absorbed by their story. And it’s not just me; apparently it spent 30 weeks on the bestseller list in Israel where it was first published, and it has just been released in Canada, so who knows how North Americans will receive it. I wish it wasn’t so long, but I recommend it nonetheless – only to those who enjoy reading about romantic relationships though. If the premise doesn’t interest you at all, give this one a pass.