Fleishman is in trouble A novel

Review by New York Times Review

Great novels warned you: Marriage is a mess. Madame Bovary despised her stifling union. The dreary husband in "Middlemarch" nearly ruined Dorothea Brooke. And as soon as Anna Karenina tumbled into the wrong bed, she fell from society, and leapt onto train tracks. In 20 th-century fiction, wedding bells tolled as forbiddingly, with a plethora of disgruntled husbands yearning to ditch capitalist conformity and hit the road. But wedlock was a lock. Which demoted many a protagonist's wife to the role of shackle. In her witty and well-observed debut, "Fleishman Is in Trouble," Taffy BrodesserAkner updates the miserable-matrimony novel, dropping it squarely in our times, where a husband complains that his wife sees him as "a blinking cursor awaiting her instructions," and extramarital affairs involve emojis. The most significant adjustment, however, is to focus on the left-behind spouse, and to make it the husband. Toby Fleishman, 41, is a doctor at a major New York hospital, which counts as a pitifully low-income job to his wife's friends. In this milieu, a house in the Hamptons is mandatory, kids are with the nanny or at Mandarin lessons and parents do spotchecks on the appalling things their little ones just posted on Instagram. After 14 years of marriage, Toby is splitting from Rachel, a successful talent agent whom he finds unloving. He nurtures their kids while she gets the soaring career, flouncing through their home "like a special guest star," as Toby complains to a divorce lawyer, noting that Rachel is also the big earner. Yes, the lawyer tells Toby, "You're the wife." Newly single, he is gripped by his phone, which pings with texts of cleavage and crotches from middle-aged women found on the kind of dating app where the dating is perfunctory at best. One day, Rachel deposits the kids at his place, and vanishes. Abruptly, he's a single parent. Toby struggles to cope at work while also trying to protect his 9-year-old, the solemn Solly, along with 11-year-old Hannah, who is smart but scathing - "becoming, it seemed to him, the kind of girl that it was completely exhausting to be." Trouble isn't limited to Fleishman. Almost everyone over 40 is in the soup. The novel's narrator, Libby, befriended Toby two decades earlier, when they were on a college year abroad in Israel. She ended up as a journalist (whose resumé bears a passing resemblance to that of BrodesserAkner, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine). But Libby has transitioned to stay-at-home motherhood, married to a steady fella who can't grasp her panic over New Jersey suburbia. "It's the order of things," he explains, patting her head. "Now we focus on the kids. We mellow with age. It's how it goes. It's not our turn anymore." She sobs. Another friend of Toby and Libby is the ever-partying financier Seth, who offers a third iteration of midlife malaise. He's safely single, enjoying rampant sex and drugs and video games. But Seth lacks human connections; he's lonely. Meantime, nobody knows the trouble Rachel has seen. In past novels, the runaway spouse might have been a sympathetic cad. Rachel, in her husband's telling, is just a nightmare. Yet this cleverly paced novel doesn't leave her story at that. 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. And time isn't a sharer. You cook dinner, or I do. In marriage, your closest ally may end up your nearest rival. "You complete me" is an awful lot of pressure. ??? rachman'S latest novel is 'The Italian Teacher."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]

---

Review by Booklist Review

When Toby Fleishman's soon-to-be-ex-wife Rachel drops their two kids at his place a day early, it does more than interrupt his hyperactive, app-fueled sexual rebounding. It confirms what he's long known: that Rachel's demanding job makes her self-involved, at best, or she's just not interested in their family, at worst. When she fails to pick them up as scheduled, things quickly get desperate. At a certain point, readers will note that maybe Toby loves being mad at Rachel a little too much, and suspect that, perhaps, there's more to the story. The book's narrator, a wonderful character whose identity is best discovered on the page, empathically tells all reams of personal histories tangled by ambition, gender, family, class, and, especially, love. A New York Times journalist known for her incisive, entertaining profiles, Brodesser-Akner proves herself also a master of startlingly true invention in her enthralling, affirming debut of midlife, marital, and existential despair. It asks and answers if there's such a thing as fairness, in marriage or in life, and if the story of a marriage can ever be told from all sides or the outside. Shrewd and delectable, this would be a novel to savor, if it were possible to put down.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Brodesser-Akner's sharp and tender-hearted debut centers on hapless 41-year-old New York hepatologist Toby Fleishman, recently separated from his driven wife, Rachel, and alternately surprised and semidisgusted to find his dating apps "crawling with women who wanted him," who prove it by sending him all manner of lewd pictures. After an increasingly rocky 14-year marriage, Toby has asked Rachel, who owns a talent agency and makes a lot more money than he does, for a divorce, because she is always angry and pays little attention to their two preteen kids. But then, as Toby is juggling new girlfriends, dying patients, and unhappy children, Rachel disappears, leaving Toby to cope with logistics more complicated than he anticipated. The novel is narrated by Toby's old college friend Libby (a device that's occasionally awkward), a former magazine journalist now bored with life as a housewife in New Jersey. Though both she and the novel are largely entrenched on Toby's side, Libby does eventually provide a welcome glimpse into Rachel's point of view. While novels about Manhattan marriages and divorces are hardly a scarce commodity, the characters in this one are complex and well-drawn, and the author's incisive sense of humor and keen observations of Upper West Side life sustain the momentum. This is a sardonically cheerful novel that readers will adore. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

It's not like Fleishman's estranged wife, a high-powered talent agent, was ever a very involved mother. But now she's dropped off the kidswhile he was asleepand disappeared.New York Times Magazine staff writer Brodesser-Akner's debut novel tracks Manhattan hepatologist Toby Fleishman through a painful divorce whose sting is mitigated somewhat by the wonders of his dating app. "Toby changed his search parameters to thirty-eight to forty-one, then forty to fifty, what the hell, and it was there that he found his gold mine: endlessly horny, sexually curious women who knew their value, who were feeling out something new, and whose faces didn't force him to have existential questions about youth and responsibility." About 30 pages in, we learn that the narrator is an old friend named Elizabeth "Libby" Slater, whom he met when both were college students on a year abroad in Israel. After the separation, his therapist advised Toby to reconnect with old friends; not having heard from him in years, Libby is at first nonplussed when he calls. A magazine journalist with a stalled career, she lives out in New Jersey, where she's no happier with motherhood than Toby's exshe describes another male friend's future marriage as "He [would] find someone young and take her life away by finally having children." Toby Fleishman is a man plagued by his height (or at least he is in Libby's account; this narrative strategy raises questions), and he has never recovered from being chubby as a child; he's on a permanent no-carb, no-fat, no-sugar diet which qualifies as an eating disorder. He's a devoted father, but he's also a doctor who's angling for promotion and a man who's trying to take advantage of the unbridled lust of middle-aged women, so his wife's mysterious disappearance is infuriating. And a little scary. Toby is a wonderful character; Libby's narrative voice is funny, smart, and a little bitter as she tells his story, and some of hers as well. You get the feeling she wants to write a novel like (the fictional) Decoupling, an outrageous, bestselling, canonical account of divorce written by one of the stars at her old magazine. Perhaps she has.Firing on all circuits, from psychological insight to cultural acuity to narrative strategy to very smart humor. Quite a debut! Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

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. Excerpted from Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---