The Romance Reader

The Romance Reader becomes more than a forbidden book for the narrator: read in secret as she prepares for marriage, it offers a close and troubling likeness to the life she fears she may be entering. Its heroine’s failed attempts to find freedom through marriage and divorce unsettle the narrator’s own conviction that a different husband will make escape possible.

Discovery and Secret Reading

The narrator brings her books to her new apartment and hides them in the bathroom cabinet. While most of the furniture has not yet arrived, she curls up on the bare floor to read The Romance Reader, a book she would not want to be caught with at home. Bubby wonders why she spends so long in the apartment when there is so little to organize; the hidden reading gives the otherwise empty space a private purpose.

Mindy lends her the novel after finishing it. The narrator understands it to be about a religious Jewish girl like herself, someone who wants to read books and wear bathing suits. That resemblance makes the book feel close to her own circumstances before she knows where its heroine’s story will lead.

The Book and Its Reported Background

The narrator is especially struck by the account that the author was Orthodox and later became secular. Through Mindy, she has also heard that the author’s mother runs a small needlepoint shop in the center of town, wears a headscarf, and no longer speaks to her daughter. These details connect the novel, for the narrator, to a life that appears to have crossed the boundary between the religious world she knows and a secular one beyond it. The estrangement is reported to her through Mindy, not presented as something she has independently verified.

Although the book presents itself as a novel, the narrator reads it as raw journalism. Its situations seem so current and recognizable that they could be happening to her, and she believes the author must have drawn on intimate experience. The book’s force for her lies in this felt proximity: fiction becomes a possible account of what may happen to someone in her position.

Marriage, Escape, and the Ending

The heroine enters an arranged marriage and discovers that her husband is weak-willed and dim-witted. She eventually divorces him, but returns to her family’s table. To the narrator, that return is the ultimate defeat: the heroine has tried marriage as a route to independence and divorce as a route to freedom, yet ends up back in the world she wanted to escape. The book leaves open the possibility that neither route provides a way out for women like her.

That possibility briefly presses against the narrator’s own expectations. She brushes away her discontent by imagining that her future husband will be brave and strong, unlike the heroine’s, and that the two of them will do together what they have been told not to do. They will leave the surrounding craziness behind. The novel therefore acts both as a warning and as a foil for her hope: its ending exposes how uncertain escape through marriage may be, while her imagined future preserves the belief that her own marriage can still lead elsewhere.