The Wrong Book

The Wrong Book is a sharp comic novel about literature, motherhood, marriage, politics, shame, genre, success and the lies people tell in order to preserve an image of themselves. Its heroine is Rona Glazer-Galanti, a woman in her thirties who once seemed to have literary promise. Years earlier she wrote a short story called “Plaque,” won second prize in a competition, and briefly became someone people expected things from. Her future husband Gidi, an archaeologist and her former university lecturer, read the story, admired it, contacted her, and later fell in love with her partly because he believed in the writer she might become. Since then, however, Rona has written almost nothing. She is stuck on a “serious” novel about a professional loneliness-reliever, and the pressure of being someone with “potential” has become suffocating.

The novel opens after the birth of Rona and Gidi’s baby, Tabai. Rona is exhausted, resentful and sleepless, carrying the baby at night while Gidi sleeps. She wants to watch Law and Order: SVU in silence, but the remote is out of reach. Instead she picks up her Kindle and, almost accidentally, starts reading a romance novel called Love Tomorrow Morning, about Mallory Whitecliff, a poor archive worker who pays to see one image from her future and glimpses herself beside a handsome mysterious man. Rona is ashamed of being drawn in, because she and Gidi live in a world where “serious” literature is morally and intellectually superior. But she keeps reading. Soon she is devouring romance novels at night while holding the baby.

At first Rona thinks she is reading them for the sex. After childbirth, her erotic life with Gidi has become strained, and the books awaken her body. But she soon realises she envies something deeper: their shamelessness, momentum, happiness and plot. Things happen in them. The characters want things openly. The genre does not apologise for pleasure. This unsettles her because her own serious writing is cautious, small, refined and stalled. She begins to wonder whether the very qualities she has been trained to despise are the ones she lacks.