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A review by storytold
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
3.5
This is an extremely readable book about the absolute insanity that is straight culture. A friend warned me when recommending this book that it was deeply heterosexual and boy: it was. Fleishman IS in trouble. They're all in trouble. Please help them. No one in this book is capable of expressing their feelings, or even identifying their feelings? There was a line that was like "I went to the movies. Adults go to the movies." This is going to become a meme in my life. Also I was up until 2 in the morning because I couldn't put this book down. Money is a pox on our society.
The book, which focuses on marriage and divorce and specifically Toby and Rachel's marriage to and divorce from each other, is told from neither Toby nor Rachel's point of view. It is told from Libby's point of view. Libby is Toby's old friend and never liked Rachel, and also is deeply, deeply ambivalent about being a wife and a mother in her own right. Rachel is self-sacrificial to a real breaking point in part because the nuclear family requires this and in part due to her own constructions of the right way forward. Toby is both fine and terrible. Libby is normal because someone in this story has to be, but also she just disappears for a day and night at a time, like, once a week, and her husband is for some reason SO passive, oh my god. As a great lover of a passive man, if I disappeared for a full day I do expect he would have something to say about it. I don't understand ANYONE'S relationships in this novel and that is why I kept reading.
Being in Libby's point of view is the only reason this book worked. Some reviewers found this distracting, but it was absolutely the right choice and prevented this from being a 2-star slog. The first time we hear "I" is like 40 pages in, and the second time is like 65 pages in, and this sparseness made me sit up and pay attention every single time, which was so smart to me. Libby's ambivalence was also a great narrative vehicle in terms of contextualizing Toby but especially in terms of contextualizing Rachel; the Rachel reveal is great and powerful and, again, only works because Libby finds her while in the throes of her own deep ambivalence.
Unfortunately, this gets so fucking heavy-handed so as to undermine the impact. It's revealed that Libby is writing a book and the last ~40 pages get way too meta as a consequence. Libby and Toby muse on how the book is going to end. Then Libby writes:
"When Rachel and I were little girls, we had been promised by a liberated society that had almost ratified the Equal Rights Amendment that we could do anything we wanted. We were told that we could be successful, ... that we could achieve anything..."
Oh, you said it out loud? You said the themes out loud? You put the themes in the book and then you also had your POV character write them into this book that we're reading explicitly?
It's a debut. It might even be a very good debut. I'll read more from this author and I'll probably stay up until 2am reading her again, and then I'll probably rate it 3.5 again. Great instincts, okay execution, really perfectly horrible characters, made me feel faintly ill and also made me feel deeply proud of myself, which I think was probably also an intended effect of this book. I may find relationships difficult and people to be the great difficulty in my life but least I'm not doing the nuclear family without the capacity for reflection. Good lord.
The book, which focuses on marriage and divorce and specifically Toby and Rachel's marriage to and divorce from each other, is told from neither Toby nor Rachel's point of view. It is told from Libby's point of view. Libby is Toby's old friend and never liked Rachel, and also is deeply, deeply ambivalent about being a wife and a mother in her own right. Rachel is self-sacrificial to a real breaking point in part because the nuclear family requires this and in part due to her own constructions of the right way forward. Toby is both fine and terrible. Libby is normal because someone in this story has to be, but also she just disappears for a day and night at a time, like, once a week, and her husband is for some reason SO passive, oh my god. As a great lover of a passive man, if I disappeared for a full day I do expect he would have something to say about it. I don't understand ANYONE'S relationships in this novel and that is why I kept reading.
Being in Libby's point of view is the only reason this book worked. Some reviewers found this distracting, but it was absolutely the right choice and prevented this from being a 2-star slog. The first time we hear "I" is like 40 pages in, and the second time is like 65 pages in, and this sparseness made me sit up and pay attention every single time, which was so smart to me. Libby's ambivalence was also a great narrative vehicle in terms of contextualizing Toby but especially in terms of contextualizing Rachel; the Rachel reveal is great and powerful and, again, only works because Libby finds her while in the throes of her own deep ambivalence.
Unfortunately, this gets so fucking heavy-handed so as to undermine the impact. It's revealed that Libby is writing a book and the last ~40 pages get way too meta as a consequence. Libby and Toby muse on how the book is going to end. Then Libby writes:
"When Rachel and I were little girls, we had been promised by a liberated society that had almost ratified the Equal Rights Amendment that we could do anything we wanted. We were told that we could be successful, ... that we could achieve anything..."
Oh, you said it out loud? You said the themes out loud? You put the themes in the book and then you also had your POV character write them into this book that we're reading explicitly?
It's a debut. It might even be a very good debut. I'll read more from this author and I'll probably stay up until 2am reading her again, and then I'll probably rate it 3.5 again. Great instincts, okay execution, really perfectly horrible characters, made me feel faintly ill and also made me feel deeply proud of myself, which I think was probably also an intended effect of this book. I may find relationships difficult and people to be the great difficulty in my life but least I'm not doing the nuclear family without the capacity for reflection. Good lord.