“Yes please … must have more of that,” doomed lovestruck protagonist Noa speaks to her Fortune 500 Mr. Big love interest in Rosenfeld. Maya Kessler’s novel wastes no time in its suggestion that Noa’s life has only truly begun upon meeting the titular Teddy Rosenfeld—it begins in medias res at a shared colleague’s wedding, where alcohol emboldens Noa’s immediate pull to him. The pair clicks immediately, but Rosenfeld has reservations and ultimately abandons Noa without even the hope of his cell phone number. The end of their first meeting is when the novel truly starts—her narration becomes incredibly fraught. “He’s got me, but he won’t let me in,” Noa thinks to herself. In her writing of Noa and Rosenfeld’s relationship, Kessler outlines her own individualized theory about the proximity between men and women. Noa is placed right up against the distance Rosenfeld has placed between them, desperately trying to cross it.
Kessler writes Noa as pounding her fist against this emotional barrier, demanding to be seen by Rosenfeld. When Noa tries to break the wall down, she draws Rosenfeld’s ire with a childlike glee that appears to be an innate detail of their relationship. Kessler describes Noa’s desire for him as incorrigible and she writes Rosenfeld as someone responsible for its correction, raising questions about power dynamics in contemporary dating. I found few actual differences in power between the pair, the only notable one being the lesser position that Noa continued to place herself in. In an early part of the text, Noa imagines Rosenfeld’s line of thought: “I’m Teddy, a very important man … what’s so important about me? Unclear.” Kessler’s prose lends power to Noa, whose obsession is so intense that the reader wonders what she could achieve if she focused on something else.
A key aspect of Rosenfeld is that everything is always Noa’s choice. Rosenfeld attempts to brush her off several times, albeit with a cloying paternalism that could potentially be misread as UCF Professor/Hello Kitty Girl coded, which may have ultimately been what Noa wanted. Still, Noa takes these shove-offs in stride, continuing her pursuit of a personal and professional relationship with Rosenfeld that lands her at his company. Not only is she courting an older man, she is also courting her boss—not that the world in which Rosenfeld occurs notes any issue with that. “It looks like he’s about to suffocate me,” Noa says excitedly in the text, and then she corrects herself: “Or kiss me?” Kessler never quite pins down what exactly makes Rosenfeld so desirable to Noa; instead she writes about how Noa’s desire eclipses everything else in her life.
Noa’s compulsive obsession with Rosenfeld brings ideas about romantic vulnerability to mind, engaging the reader through provocative content that urges self-reflection about their own relationships. I initially chose Maya Kessler’s Rosenfeld because it sounded like an empowering female sexual fantasy, like how Gone Girl would make you feel after a break-up. Kessler’s text is instead about a woman that knows exactly why something is bad for her, but she nevertheless continues it. Rosenfeld, with its thorough and obsessive narrative centered on the titular man, is like the lonely silence that hangs in the air after a misunderstanding. Kessler, in all of her clear talent, leaves whatever created this gap in Noa up to the reader. As she becomes more voracious in her pursuit of him, the text almost leans towards tragedy in its fidelity to twenty-first-century dating. Noa’s actions bring Jenny Holzer’s old aphorism to mind: “Protect me from what I want.”
FICTION
Rosenfeld
By Maya Kessler
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published November 19, 2024
