Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
When Toby Fleishman and his wife of over fifteen years divorced, he believed he knew what to expect: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some lingering resentment, and the occasional tense moment in their co-parenting discussions. He had no way of knowing that one day, in the thick of his summer of sexual liberation, Rachel would simply leave their two kids at his house and not come back. He had been putting a lot of effort into achieving balance in his solitary life. His long-dormant hope was finally starting to build up steam. Then this.
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
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Toby’s neat story of the rejected husband with the overly ambitious wife serves as his only solace as he struggles to find out where Rachel left off while also managing his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental responsibilities, and his new sexual popularity aided by an app. Toby will have to take into account the possibility that he may not have first seen things properly if he ever hopes to fully comprehend what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage.
Fleishman Is in Trouble is a smart, frightening, and frequently humorous portrayal of a culture struggling to traverse the fault lines of an institution that has demonstrated itself to be worthy of both our great wariness and our great hope. It is a scorching, completely uncensored debut.
Top hepatologist Toby Fleishman, M.D., earns a good quarter million dollars a year as a physician at a prestigious hospital in New York City. But his wife Rachel, who runs her own creative business and earns five times as much as her husband, thinks that’s insufficient. This is Manhattan in the 2000s, and money is everything because you need a lot of it to afford a luxurious lifestyle that includes a posh apartment with the appropriate address, private schools for the kids, a home in the Hamptons, and trips to Europe. She finds it very frustrating that Toby simply doesn’t give a damn about any of that. For Rachel, having money, status, and people’s approval is everything. Toby’s main priority is to love the kids.
The romance between Rachel and Toby fades away. They part ways. They decide on custody. Nevertheless, before the divorce is finalized, Rachel vanishes and ceases all communication, leaving Toby with the kids as he develops an odd obsession with sexual dating apps after recently learning about them.
The book comprises three chapters, all told by the nameless narrator, who is an old buddy of Toby’s named Libby who he met in Israel during their junior year abroad and hasn’t seen since. This is extremely puzzling, if not downright unsettling. Libby is a former magazine writer who is now a contentedly married, stay-at-home mother in a suburb of New Jersey. Toby’s perspective is featured in the opening chapter.
While the third chapter is told from all three points of view, the second chapter is primarily from Toby’s perspective with significant contributions from Libby. Every marriage has two sides, just like its breakdown.
