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Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel Hardcover – June 18, 2019

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Author)

3.9 16,824 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “A masterpiece” (NPR) about marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition

Now an FX limited series on Hulu, starring Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, Lizzy Caplan, and Adam Brody

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Entertainment Weekly, The New York Public Library
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, USA Today Vanity Fair, Vogue, NPR, Chicago Tribune, GQ, Vox, Refinery29, Elle, The Guardian, Real Simple, Financial Times, Parade, Good Housekeeping, New Statesman, Marie Claire, Town & Country, Evening Standard, Thrillist, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, BookRiot, Shelf Awareness

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this.

As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place.

A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope.

Alma’s Best Jewish Novel of the Year • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House
Publication date

June 18, 2019
Dimensions

6.33 x 1.33 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0525510877
ISBN-13

978-0525510871
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The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older.
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Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.
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AGAIN I’LL SAY IT: Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exception to that rule is the friends you make in college.
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From the Publisher

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This glorious debut has the humor of Maria Semple, the heart of Meg Wolitzer, the lustiness of Philip Roth, and a voice that is pure. It’s wild and wonderful and goes in so many directions, each with profundity—my favorite thing that novels can do. How does one's favorite journalist become one's new favorite novelist? With this book.”—Emma Straub

“When his ex drops the kids off and doesn’t come back, a father of two revisits the choices that led to this moment. He searches for answers, hilariously and heartbreakingly avoiding the darkest questions. Brodesser-Akner’s debut is a referendum on marriage, friendship, and how we live (and love) right now.”—People

“Whip-smart, gleefully scatological . . . [Brodesser-Akner] aims a perfect gimlet eye at the city’s relentless self-regard. . . . But her best trick may be the novel’s narrator: An elusive presence identified at first only as an old friend of Toby’s from their study-abroad days, she turns out to be both the book’s Trojan horse and—in a brilliant third-act pivot—its greatest gift, transforming a fizzy comedy of manners into something genuinely, unexpectedly profound.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Many novelists have written excellent fictional indictments of interpersonal and systemic sexism. Not since Teju Cole’s Open City—a very different book in all other respects—has a novelist put the reader on the wrong side the way Brodesser-Akner does. To do so, she uses a lot of intelligence, a lot of anger, a great sense of humor and a whole new variation on the magic we know from her magazine work. The result is a maddening, unsettling masterpiece, and, yes, you will be moved and inexplicably grateful at the end.”—NPR

“In her witty and well-observed debut, Taffy Brodesser-Akner updates the miserable-matrimony novel, dropping it squarely in our times. . . . Brodesser-Akner has written a potent, upsetting and satisfying novel, illustrating how the marital pledge—build our life together—overlooks a key fact: There are two lives.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Electric . . . Brodesser-Akner’s first foray into fiction—set in Manhattan, the Hamptons, and Israel—is funny, stylish, and insightful, whether describing men’s challenged communication skills or the knife juggler’s agility required to maintain a modern marriage.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s sharp debut novel is packed with humor and heart. In it, the titular trouble begins when Toby Fleishman realizes that Rachel—his wife of 15 years, from whom he’s now separated—is missing. Where has she gone, and why? This book will have you racing through the pages to find the answers.”—Southern Living

“Everything you could wish for in a satisfying summer read . . . Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s page-turner doubles as a satirical take on modern relationships.”—Women’s Health

About the Author

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. She has also written for GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and many other publications. Fleishman Is in Trouble is her first novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Toby Fleishman awoke one morning inside the city he’d lived in all his adult life and which was suddenly somehow now crawling with women who wanted him. Not just any women, but women who were self-actualized and independent and knew what they wanted. Women who weren’t needy or insecure or self-doubting, like the long-ago prospects of his long-gone youth—meaning the women he had thought of as prospects but who had never given him even a first glance. No, these were women who were motivated and available and interesting and interested and exciting and excited. These were women who would not so much wait for you to call them one or two or three socially acceptable days after you met them as much as send you pictures of their genitals the day before. Women who were open-minded and up for anything and vocal about their desires and needs and who used phrases like “put my cards on the table” and “no strings attached” and “I need to be done in ten because I have to pick up Bella from ballet.” Women who would fuck you like they owed you money, was how our friend Seth put it.

Yes, who could have predicted that Toby Fleishman, at the age of forty-one, would find that his phone was aglow from sunup to sundown (in the night the glow was extra bright) with texts that contained G-string and ass cleavage and underboob and sideboob and just straight-up boob and all the parts of a woman he never dared dream he would encounter in a person who was three- dimensional—meaning literally three-dimensional, as in a person who wasn’t on a page or a computer screen. All this, after a youth full of romantic rejection! All this, after putting a lifetime bet on one woman! Who could have predicted this? Who could have predicted that there was such life in him yet?

Still, he told me, it was jarring. Rachel was gone now, and her goneness was so incongruous to what had been his plan. It wasn’t that he still wanted her—he absolutely did not want her. He absolutely did not wish she were still with him. It was that he had spent so long waiting out the fumes of the marriage and busying himself with the paperwork necessary to extricate himself from it—telling the kids, moving out, telling his colleagues—that he had not considered what life might be like on the other side of it. He understood divorce in a macro way, of course. But he had not yet adjusted to it in a micro way, in the other-side-of-the-bed-being-empty way, in the nobody-to-tell-you-were-running-late way, in the you-belong-to-no-one way. How long was it before he could look at the pictures of women on his phone—pictures the women had sent him eagerly and of their own volition—straight on, instead of out of the corner of his eye? Okay, sooner than he thought but not immediately. Certainly not immediately.

He hadn’t looked at another woman once during his marriage, so in love with Rachel was he—so in love was he with any kind of institution or system. He made solemn, dutiful work of trying to save the relationship even after it would have been clear to any reasonable person that their misery was not a phase. There was nobility in the work, he believed. There was nobility in the suffering. And even after he realized that it was over, he still had to spend years, plural, trying to convince her that this wasn’t right, that they were too unhappy, that they were still young and could have good lives without each other—even then he didn’t let one millimeter of his eye wander. Mostly, he said, because he was too busy being sad. Mostly because he felt like garbage all the time, and a person shouldn’t feel like garbage all the time. More than that, a person shouldn’t be made horny when he felt like garbage. The intersection of horniness and low self-esteem seemed reserved squarely for porn consumption.

But now there was no one to be faithful to. Rachel wasn’t there.

She was not in his bed. She was not in the bathroom, applying liquid eyeliner to the area where her eyelid met her eyelashes with the precision of an arthroscopy robot. She was not at the gym, or coming back from the gym in a less black mood than usual, not by much but a little. She was not up in the middle of the night, complaining about the infinite abyss of her endless insomnia. She was not at Curriculum Night at the kids’ extremely private and yet somehow progressive school on the West Side, sitting in a small chair and listening to the new and greater demands that were being placed on their poor children compared to the prior year. (Though, then again she rarely was. Those nights, like the other nights, she was at work, or at dinner with a client, what she called “pulling her weight” when she was being kind, and what she called “being your cash cow” when she wasn’t.) So no, she was not there. She was in a completely other home, the one that used to be his, too. Every single morning this thought overwhelmed him momentarily; it panicked him, so that the rst thing he thought when he awoke was this: Something is wrong. There is trouble. I am in trouble. It had been he who asked for the divorce, and still: Something is wrong. There is trouble. I am in trouble. Each morning, he shook this off. He reminded himself that this was what was healthy and appropriate and the natural order. She wasn’t supposed to be next to him anymore. She was supposed to be in her separate, nicer home.

But she wasn’t there, either, not on this particular morning. He learned this when he leaned over to his new IKEA nightstand and picked up his phone, whose beating presence he felt even in those few minutes before his eyes officially opened. He had maybe seven or eight texts there, most of them from women who had reached out during the night via his dating app, but his eyes went straight to Rachel’s text, somewhere in the middle. It seemed to give off a different light than the ones that contained body parts and lacy bands of panty; it somehow drew his eyes in a way the others didn’t. At five a.m. she’d written, I’m headed to Kripalu for the weekend; the kids are at your place FYI.

It took two readings to realize what that meant, and Toby, ignoring the erection he’d allowed to flourish knowing that his phone was rife with new masturbation material, jumped out of bed. He ran into the hallway, and he saw that their two children were in their bedrooms, asleep. FYI the kids were there? FYI? FYI was an afterthought; FYI was supplementary. It wasn’t essential. This information, that his children had been deposited into his home under the cover of darkness during an unscheduled time with the use of a key that had been supplied to Rachel in case of a true and dire emergency, seemed essential.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition, 10th printing (June 18, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525510877
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525510871
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.33 x 1.33 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #149,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #994 in Fiction Satire
- #5,143 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #9,735 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. She has also written for GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and many other publications. Fleishman Is in Trouble is her first novel.

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Before You Read This, Know What You're Getting: It's ChickLit, Not Literature as the Awards Suggest

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

Reminiscent of Lauren Groff's brilliant novel "Fates and Furies," this remake is whiny, whiny, whiny, as well as a quite daringly sexy read, but most important it is not as erudite, intelligent, or shocking as Groff's literary masterpiece. In all fairness, author Taffy Brodesser-Akner probably doesn't think of this book as a "Fates and Furies" remake, but because the plot/structure similarities are unmistakably alike it's hard not to compare them.

And "Fleishman Is in Trouble" is a poor runner-up.

This is the plot set-up: Toby Fleishman, M.D. is a top hepatologist at a top New York City hospital, making a respectable quarter of million dollars a year. But that's not enough for his wife, Rachel, who has her own creative agency representing actors and makes five times what her husband pulls in. This is Manhattan in the 2000s and it's all about money because it takes a lot of it to buy the lifestyle of a tony apartment with the right address, private schools for the children, a house in the Hamptons, and vacations in Europe. She is greatly annoyed that Toby just doesn't care about any of that. Rachel is all about the money and prestige and impressing others. Toby is all about loving the children. Rachel and Toby's love story dissolves. They separate. They work out child custody. But before the divorce is final, Rachel disappears and goes completely incommunicado, leaving Toby (who has recently discovered sexy dating apps and has become weirdly obsessed with them) with the children.

The novel has three chapters, all told by the narrator—unnamed for quite some time, which is incredibly confusing, if not actually disconcerting—who is an old friend of Toby's named Libby whom he met in Israel during their junior year abroad and hasn't seen since. Libby is a former magazine writer turned happily married, stay-at-home New Jersey suburban mom. The first chapter is from Toby's point of view. The second chapter is mostly from Toby's point of view with a lot of Libby interjecting her own story, while the third chapter is from all three points of view. After all, every marriage—and its disintegration—has two sides.

I am willing to stretch my imagination for every novel I read and give the author a lot of artistic license. But Libby as the narrator is just too much—even for me. Libby is a distant friend, but somehow Libby knows intimate, incredibly personal details about both Toby and Rachel. It is completely, eye-rollingly implausible.

And did I mention it is whiny? Oh, so very, very whiny. Uber-privileged, rich white people who have everything in the world kind of whiny.

One more thing: The ending is awful. Very, very disappointing.

Longlisted for the National Book Award, this is a well-written, satirical novel that is amusing and entertaining, although quite pretentious, but it absolutely does not rise to the level of great literature as its National Book Award nomination would suggest. It is ChickLit. And because of all the whining, it's not even very good ChickLit. Just know you're getting ChickLit and not literature before you buy the book. I have no idea why it's so highly overrated.

133 people found this helpful

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JSD

Brilliant, complex narrative that may just double as free therapy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 31, 2019

Verified Purchase

I couldn't put this book down, reading it in two sittings where I normally only get to devote 30 minutes at a time (weekends only) to engage in leisure reading. I liked the author's writing style from an unrelated article some several months back but honestly wouldn't have put her name together with this book, nor maybe even have run across the book at all, but for her appearance on a podcast I listen to daily. That one episode- not particularly focused on the book itself- made me immediately order the book, and I wasn't disappointed.

Aside from a rare talent for description that digs deep and then surfaces a distilled understanding that makes perfectly clear the underpinnings of the scene, the author equips readers with the ability to follow the characters lock-step in a way that feels personal, revealing, and uniquely participatory. Think: If Bob Ross were to have broken down the unforgiving/unforgivable ennui and tortuous stagnation rewarded to women siloed by gendered expectations of career/partnerhood/motherhood/ambition/sexuality/aggression/fulfillment in the same way he could dismantle, clarify, and reconstitute a landscape into its component parts. Even the delivery of this story, which is accomplished by following the challenges posed to the (sympathetic) male hero, embodies the concepts explored in the book that a woman's story can only be told (accepted?) through the male experience. We like Toby, we root for Toby, and his experience is no less valid or significant... But the unheard story is that of Rachel, whose half of the marital decline is summed up in only a few pages- a footnote to the story of Toby.

The point is not that the book focused on Toby and his experience, but is much deeper; would the story, if told exclusively from the position of Rachel, be palatable? As sympathic? Would Rachel also be seen as the hero/victim, or as an ungrateful, dissatisfied, and overly ambitious semi-villain who selfishly placed her material wants over family and a devoted partner? Would this book even be received by readers if it told the story of a driven woman who was forced to balance, somewhat precariously, a career and children and found her life unsatisfactory despite undeniable success, relative wealth/privilege, and a supportive husband? Or would its "acceptance" be another "the future is female" empty gesture at best, at worst a nagging, self-indulgent example of a third wave feminist trope? The author seems to suggest, through the side story of the narrator, that this focus- the lens that transforms the counternarrative of Rachel into a digestable, secondary story- is a deliberately covert way to make this point. And it's effective.

The book tells a good story. But more significantly, reading it was therapeutic. All the frenetic, painfully conflicted ways of thinking about paths and paths not taken, the tradeoffs required to aim high (but not too high), to be a partner (but too often more paternalistic than partnered in the uneven negotiation of egos and expectations), and the unwavering guilt of it all... The way these considerations are put on us and put on ourselves, the way even women judge other women- directly or indirectly, these things aren't talked about. Not really.

This book presents a kind of comfort in knowing that one's experience and ways of processing and feeling aren't unique. That your variety of madness and disquiet aren't personal. And that if, when you read Toby's story, you both sympathize and instinctively feel the presence of the anti-matter in that universe, that of Rachel's experience, you are not selfish or alone.

28 people found this helpful

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Erika

Underwhelming

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 17, 2022

Verified Purchase

Not really my vibe. This book covers social commentary for the wealthy keeping up with the Joneses of the Manhattan social scene, as well as the struggles within crumbling relationships that began before dating apps. The main characters just seemed really selfish and whiny. Toby is constantly talking about sex like a horny teenager who just figured out he can do it. Rachel is missing the whole book and when I found out the what and why of it, it felt really anticlimactic. It does have poignant commentary on dating/hook-ups/relationships/etc. in this age of tech based communication. There's also an overview of the pressures women receive in the workplace and in relationships compared to their male counterparts. It was a struggle for me to push through the book and by the end I felt underwhelmed.

21 people found this helpful

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K. Fitch

Really good - until it was terrible

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 24, 2023

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I LOVED this book for the first 60% or so (read it on Kindle so I don’t know pages numbers.) Smart, very funny while also deeply sad with a lot of hurt and anger and over the top impersonal sexual acrobatics. The the sadness got thicker and the humor and delightful language turned into harangue and WILDLY overstated angst of the privileged, and I skimmed the last 30 pps or so wanting it just to end. Lots of highlighted passages, wonderful observations about people, relationships, class, life …. But in the end a story that lost its way.

4 people found this helpful

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amantedofado

A good writer who needed a much better editor

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

I was drawn to this book through the New York Jewish magazine Tablet, where it was described as similar to Philip Roth (my favourite writer). The similarities are there: an engaging prose style with clever insights and a lot about sex. It started with great promise, but it turned out to be far too long. As the author of 26 novels, some bestsellers, I have been edited by top editors in London and New York, and I know only too well how a good editor can pull an author back from major problems with characters, plot, and length. I read this to the end, but got very fed up long before the end came in sight. Basically, very little happens, the same issues are duplicated again and again, there is even a deliberate repetition of three passages, the author introduces herself under a false name further on, and nothing advances the plot. A good editor would have told her to go back to the start, map out a meaningful plot, shorten the text by about 50%. Even the endless displays of the writer's cleverness needed to be cut to the quick. The basic question for Ms Brodesser-Akner would be whether she would work with a strong editor who could teach her how best to handle what is basically a long short story that has grown out of all proportion. She can handle prose better than most new authors, but if she wants to build a writing career beyond journalism, she needs to work a lot harder at novel-writing, and a starting point for that would be to find a better publisher who employs a serious editor. I'm afraid I have to agree with many of the negative commentators here.

42 people found this helpful

ROROBLUSMUM

Sorry, but Fleishman Is Boring, Juvenile and a DNF @ 54/373 pages gone. Fleishman's getting binned!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 23, 2019

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Despite all the bigging up and the praise from all and sundry, I couldn't make it past page 54 of this irritating 373 page novel. I wonder if I'd perhaps have appreciated it more if I'd been Jewish, or been more familiar with all things Jewish? With Jewish customs and traditions and food, etc., because a lot was mentioned, and I think/suspect that the people in Toby's life, going forward, are all Jewish of varying degrees of Judaism? And, more for me, if Toby hadn't been made out to sound like a sad loser?

I mean, the poor guy's five-foot, five inches tall, with receding hair and is in the process of being divorced. He's a liver specialist at a hospital, not the most exciting of doctors. And, he's just discovered dating apps and sounded like a horny teen. I got fed up of the various females (and female nationalities) mentioned, who were apparently body-parts-pic'ing him morning, noon and night, so much so that his phone was the first thing he grabbed in the morning to check on booty calls, etc. How could the guy not see that these women were as desperate housewives as he was desperate divorced-dad? He sounded like he really thought he was The Man. Actually, he sounded really boring and not much of a prize, tbh, and I couldn't see him as book-lead material. He did perk up and turn professional for a few minutes when he finally made it into work and a patient needed diagnosing, morphing into Dr Gregory House, complete with student-doctor followers, and reaching a diagnosis based on House-isms. That was quite interesting and made me note that whilst a copper ring around my iris might be attractive, should one occur one day, it's a sign of liver failure and I should seek urgent medical help. But, I digress.

Add in that the tale then started to be told from what I believe were differing 1st Person perspectives. I didn't clock on about this soon enough and wondered for a while who was talking and why the book had suddenly changed from Third Person narrative. Only when I read on and this newcomer's former job was mentioned did I realise that she was a (Jewish) university friend of Toby's whom he'd reconnected with on the advice of his therapist who'd told him to get in touch with all the friends he'd dropped over the last 10 years or so of his marriage, and who'd appeared in a flashback part of the book. She (I can't remember her name now, 2 mins after putting the book down) and Seth (also Jewish, and very crude, a la American Pie, in his teen-like humour) went to Israel with Toby where I think they dossed around a bit?

Not once did I smile or laugh in the 54 pages that I read. That could be on me, as I don't always find pop 'funnies' funny, but here I struggle to recall anything funny, other than that allegedly, Toby's (non-Jewish) about-to-be ex-wife's (Jewish) friend who's been botoxed and fillered and skinny'd, and who was much taller than him (it was made to sound as if the whole world is taller than Toby) suddenly made a move that made him think she was coming onto him. It was the fact that he was suddenly so full of his 'sexual attraction' to so many, many desperate-sounding women that might have made me huff a little, but not full-out LOL. Not even Toby and Seth's explanation of 5th base (the 'bases' thing is something we Brits aren't quite as crude as to have, and don't entirely understand, I suspect) made me laugh. Nope, this is a definite DNF.

Oh, and maybe the microscopic font doesn't help the book's case? I struggled to read it, on top of struggling to read the tale.

Beware: this irritating book stays in your mind. I woke up one morning, about 3 days after finishing this, with my cat (RoroBlu) smacking me on the face with his paw, pulling me from sleep. I'd been dreaming that RoroBlu was smacking me and telling me, *Taffy Brodesser-Akner*, off for writing such an awful book, and full-naming 'me'. Yes, my cat was telling the author off for the book. Weird, but cathartic, as I now no longer have the book in my head!

105 people found this helpful

Huckle

Funny sad and so well observed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 20, 2019

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When I absolutely love a book it always surprises me to read a poor review.
I thought this book was amazing. The insight into how women feel about their lives and ultimately what they have to accept was nothing short of miraculous. This is not intended to sound sexist but I am not sure a man can really understand the female angst within this book.
This book is anything but boring. in my view it is an exceptional novel and may it receive all the plaudits it deserves.

30 people found this helpful

Bridget Proust

Self-congratulation

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 29, 2019

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Dreadful, self-obsessed, whinging. None of the characters came to life, they were all mouthpieces for the author’s self-congratulatory insights and observations, some of the sharp and amusing. Full of fashionable received opinions about parenting. Much too long and verbose.

25 people found this helpful

ReaderWriter

A curate's egg of a novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 2, 2020

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I had read / heard a lot about this book - some good, some bad - before I decided to make up my own mind and buy it. What I discovered is that Fleishman Is In Trouble is a mix of both good and bad, but I awarded it four stars because despite the negatives, I did enjoy it.
First the positives. The writing is very New York savvy, very Jewish savvy, very middle-aged angst savvy. It is essentially the story of the end of a marriage, and all the bitterness and recrimination that entails. Fleishman is a 41 year-old-doctor with a chip on his shoulder about his height (5'5"). He and his more successful wife are separated and she leaves the children with him while she goes on a yoga retreat. This puts a dent in his rampant, online-driven sex life - a graphically depicted series of lurid copulations with women who are as desperate and lonely as him. Things go awry, however, when Fleishman's wife, Rachel, doesn't return from her trip, or contact anyone to say why. Most of the book is devoted to this period, and the contempt / simmering rage / loathing etc, that Fleishman feels towards her. Their two, chalk-and-cheese children - Solly like his dad, Hannah like her mum - suffer too, as the three of them endure the limbo of not knowing what has happened to the absent-without-leave Rachel.
All is revealed in the final part of the book (it has three parts - no chapters) and without spoilers, all I can say is that she is not the selfish monster her husband would have us believe. She has made her own sacrifices and received little but criticism and resentment in return.
I don't think I have ever read the break-up of a family in such unsparing, tortuous detail, and it won't be to everyone's taste. Why use one metaphor / simile / analogy, when ten will do? This brings me the greatest negative of this book, which is that it's horribly over-written. The story, such as it is (it's character-driven, not plot-driven), is constantly being held-up by pages of backstory, anecdotes (from childhood, school, college), reflections on the meaning of life etc. I quickly tired of these great slabs of ancillary information and tended to speed-read them, or skip them altogether. They would have served the story much more effectively if they hadn't gone on for so long. I get it - Fleishman considers himself above avarice, more socially conscious, a better dad than Rachel is a mum, New York is a rat race - but I am beaten to death with this information over and over.
Also, the book's structure was slightly mystifying. Toby, the main character, was written in the third person, but there was also a first person narrative from his old college friend, Libby. It was very uneven - much more Toby than Libby, and I really didn't care about Libby. I assume she was there because at the end, she is instrumental in solving the mystery of Rachel, but she was so unlikeable (selfish, moaning, navel-gazing, drowning in self-pity) I speed-read her sections too. A few times I wondered if she was actually the voice of the author, who wanted to rant and rave about how unfair life is for women in general, but particularly creative women who are a bit overweight after having had a couple of kids. This was really the whole point of the book - to show how impossible marriage is, how elusive happiness is, how (scream, shout, scream some more) much these affluent, privileged people SUFFER!
Overall it was a good read - funny in parts, insightful in others. It will be interesting to see what her second novel is like.

16 people found this helpful

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