One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.”

“It seemed to be one of life’s wonders,” observes Sherwyn Sexton, the not wholly unlikable cad at the center of Fay Weldon’s lively if sometimes frustrating new novel, “Before the War,” “that nothing happens and nothing happens and all of a sudden everything happens.”

I had always dreamed of a job that engaged in some aspect of the business of books. Although I was writing novels and taking on freelance work—for a time I became the queen of the 800-word feature story for a couple of international newspapers, accepting any assignment that came along, from writing about children’s birthday parties to the black market economy in India—I had not had a steady paycheck since my twenties.