I have just finished a mid century romance novel that was recommended, believe it or not, by the New York Times.
It was an old classic, set in Paris in a fashion house in the 1950s, which I thought might be mildly entertaining in a nostalgic and unchallenging sort of way. However, I was completely blindsided by the ending. In the last couple of pages, she had her happy ending with an entirely different man to the one I was expecting.
I’ve since been trying to figure out what happened. Is it a sign of general mental befuddlement on my part? But I haven’t been having the same sort of trouble with any other books I’ve been reading, so I don’t think that’s it. Is the author just very clever, hiding her swain in plain sight until the big reveal at the end? But that would seem to go against the accepted pattern for a romance, where it’s generally understood you have to know who’s in the running at least, so you know who to root for.
No, I think the problem here is simply that times have changed more than I’d appreciated in the last seventy odd years. The man she ended up with was a much older authority figure, and was in fact her boss, who she was afraid of a lot of the time. Several times she thought he was going to fire her. And in the meantime, she was being wooed by a charming and handsome young diplomat, that she went out with a number of times and had a great time with. Plus, there was an ex in the picture with his new fiancé, just to muddy the water. Really, the scary old boss man was not on my radar at all. Maybe he was supposed to be giving off Pygmalion* vibes, but the power imbalance just made the whole thing creepy. Is it a good thing that I expect a romance to be amongst equals? But surely human nature hasn’t changed that much. I’m still astonished I missed their relationship entirely. I wonder if I’m too naive, or just not the expert human study I thought I was?
*The play that the musical My Fair Lady was based on.