The narrator...is longing for a story to tell ... And God, does she tell it well ... a Tinder-age Portnoy's Complaint ... The great trick of Fleishman Is in Trouble is that it cons the reader into siding with Toby. Brodesser-Akner demonstrates how women get suckered into acquiescing to misogyny by suckering both narrator and reader—and then showing us what she's done. When I saw her trick, I was floored ... Brodesser-Akner...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.
... even better than we were promised. Taffy Brodesser-Akner brings to her first novel the currency of a hot dating app and the wisdom of a Greek tragedy. The result is a feminist jeremiad nested inside a brilliant comic novel—a book that makes you laugh so hard you don’t notice till later that your eyebrows have been singed off ... Brodesser-Akner demonstrates an anthropologist’s thoroughness in her study of contemporary adult dating and its catalogue of sexual practices, but her prose, ringing with manic energy, is obscenely funny ... With merciless precision, Brodesser-Akner traces the arcing trajectory of doomed affections: the glorious takeoff, the deluded calm, the shrieking descent ... I haven’t felt this much energy sparking off a novel since Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. ... Conveying the full tragedy of that predicament in a story that’s often blisteringly funny is the real triumph of this book. Few novels express so clearly that we’re all in trouble.
Long litanies comprised of sentences that all start the same way are one of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s things ... when we meet Toby and Rachel’s 11-year-old daughter, Hannah, for the first time, the words ‘Or because’ preface 12 different possible explanations for Rachel’s increasingly bitchy behaviour. Brodesser-Akner gets away with this maximalism. She doesn’t just get away with it, she uses these passages to add to her story’s landslide momentum. She doesn’t just get away with it, she downright relishes her refusal ever to land on just one perfect description or just one plausible explanation, because she’s a natural raconteur whose knack for trapping readers in her web must leave her editors in a state of exhausted inertia ... I imagine Brodesser-Akner’s editors throwing up their hands: move that Jenga brick and the whole thing really would come crashing down.
Fleishman Is in Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, meanders amiably until it becomes, suddenly, all sharpness ... Brodesser-Akner, a Michelangelo of magazine profiles (in an echo of Libby, she used to work for GQ and now lives in New Jersey), writes with a thrilling swagger, though her descriptions can feel cartoonish, more intent on charming an audience than on getting it right ... The book channels Tom Wolfe’s fiction—the gonzo, swooshy sentences, the satirical edge—and Roth is everywhere, too ... There’s an electric surge wherever the raggedness of this language touches Libby’s own story ... Brodesser-Akner prods the form of the marriage novel as though it were a sleeping lump on the other side of the bed. What if there were a third character? ... And yet there is, in the end, a redemption at work, achieved not by novelty—the surprise of perspective—but by old-fashioned insight. As a profile writer, Brodesser-Akner kindles empathy for her famous subjects, and her novelistic approach is similar.
... enthralling ... with this book, Brodesser-Akner has done exactly what her fictional counterpart promises to do. She writes with the heft and masterful wordplay of a Wolfe, but with empathy for and curiosity about all the players in the tale. It’s a cutting sociological dissection of the way we live now, but it cares about its characters as people in a way that’s absent from the prose of Wolfe — or, for that matter, Jonathan Franzen, whose work Brodesser-Akner evokes while confidently one-upping ... will occasionally make you angry at the things the people in it do, but mostly it will make you hungry for whatever Brodesser-Akner is going to write next.
The remarkable thing Brodesser-Akner has done is to write a book that offers a sharp critique of the lie fueling modern feminism and is brilliantly disguised as a book about a man ... Brodesser-Akner is equally entertaining and insightful as she judgmentally walks us through Manhattan’s world of the incredibly rich, its uber-alpha, finance-bro husbands and stay-at-home mothers with an endless supply of nannies ... From inside Toby’s mind and world, Brodesser-Akner makes some shrewd, impactful, incredibly funny, and incredibly correct points about class and friendship and marriage and divorce and aging and parenting and love. And there’s a version of this book that could have carried on that way to the end. Fortunately, Brodesser-Akner has written something better ... a long-overdue look at women who are disappearing in real time. Women who didn’t realize this would happen to them, too ... The more the women come into focus, the more compelling the book becomes ... Fleishman Is in Trouble is a book that is desperately searching for solutions to the despair of gender disparity that it knows it won’t find—and yet, Brodesser-Akner and her characters helplessly and relentlessly and incredibly charmingly search for them anyway.
Fleishman Is in Trouble is a remarkable work of ventriloquism ... Fleishman Is in Trouble is so much smarter than a Great American Novel wannabe written by another clever man ... Brodesser-Akner shows great skill as Libby the narrator takes on Toby’s perspective to pass judgment on the women in his life ... What Brodesser-Akner has achieved here, by Trojan-horsing herself into Toby’s point of view, is to quietly reveal the souls of the women in the story. But more than that, to show that all stories—about marriage, love, loss, hope and disappointment—really are universal ... This is an honest, powerful, human story with no apologies. And it will do the 'American Novel' a power of good.
... while Fleishman Is in Trouble holds up a mirror to Manhattanites practising 'self-care' in athleisurewear, the portrait remains a still. Plot is propelled by desire, and it is difficult to determine here what the characters are after ... A glimmer of optimism at the end of the book reads more like resignation than redemption—unsurprising, perhaps, when the pathway out of a mid-life muddle is illuminated only by the dull, cold glow of a smartphone screen.
The author’s sharp wit and descriptions of a certain urban privileged life are dead-on and often hilarious. The novel feels fresh and modern with a satirical edge, but enough truth to sting even the schmoopiest of married couples ... There’s a plot twist that drives the narrative, but it’s the way that Brodesser-Akner manages to notice both the minutiae of relationships that universally drives people crazy as well as a macro picture of how being married feels after 15 years that anchor the book ... Infusing candor, humor and social commentary, this book holds up a mirror to all of us, demanding that we take a hard look at how we live and how we love.
... a romp ... The gambit works, as Brodessor-Akner knows it always does. Successfully Trojan horsed, Elizabeth Epstein reveals herself as the most insightful, sensitive fictional voice in many years. She sacks Troy. She is full of casual wisdom, and her wordplay rewards close reading ... Above all, Epstein has the frankness and courage to observe, to imagine, and to tell the stories of the unseen.
... [a] hip-smart, gleefully scatological debut ... Brodesser-Akner...aims a perfect gimlet eye at [New York City's] relentless self-regard ... 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.
In her witty and well-observed debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner updates the miserable-matrimony novel, dropping it squarely in our times ... 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.
The author does cast a satiric and sometimes amusing eye on both the frantic race for status among Rachel and her women friends and the feverish pursuit of sex among newly unencumbered men like Toby ... Brodesser-Akner has been utterly successful at creating a monster [in Rachel]. And she’s created a male protagonist who goes the extra mile to do the right thing. He may be a fool with regard to sex, but he’s no knave. That said, female readers may disagree. This is a book shot through with the pain of divorce, the droll weirdness of our sexual drives, the inanities of people with too much money, and the bewilderment of the young looking on as adults carry on like children. If the author had condensed her prose a bit instead of engaging in endless riffs that merely repeat a thought, Fleishman Is in Trouble would be even better.
For three-quarters of Fleishman Is in Trouble (which is a bit too long if, like me, you find Toby irritating), Libby narrates Toby’s experiences and feelings and tribulations, only occasionally mentioning her own. And then, towards the end, the book flips. We get Rachel’s story. It turns out that Toby is not the only Fleishman in trouble. Along with Brodesser-Akner’s perfect-comic-timing prose, this flip is one of the greatest pleasures in the book ... By shifting the focus at the very end away from Toby and onto Rachel and Libby, Brodesser-Akner performs a neat sleight of hand, turning a man’s travails into a woman’s growth. Usually, of course, it’s the other way around.
How miserable is too miserable? Taffy Brodesser-Akner poses the question and successfully mines it for laughs ... funny, yes, but also savage, landing blows with efficient and deadly precision, fearless in its ravaging of gender double standards, the inequities of modern marriage and the bewildering intersection of sex and technology ... Brodesser-Akner turns the tables on Toby with wit, insight and a bracing, simmering rage. She offers a view of truths we may fear to examine too closely. How miserable is too miserable? Keep asking, she urges. Maybe one day, we’ll find out.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s assured and spiky novel about a busted marriage...is an assault on misleading surfaces. In most domestic novels, that means revelations of an affair, a hidden trauma or a long-buried family crisis. But Brodesser-Akner is after something more common yet more subtle: the inability of two members of a couple to simply hear each other, and how that miscommunication is often gendered ... Fleishman is a highly entertaining novel about 40-something foibles, but it also delivers a piercing message about just how much within a relationship is prone to misinterpretation ...
Taffy Brodesser-Akner...has a gift for making the stalest genre...as compulsively readable as an Agatha Christie mystery. Her prose is seamless, her asides clever, her observations always on point. Without flattening her subjects, she locates the stakes of their quotidian dramas and the hidden tensions of their seemingly controlled lives, transforming something unremarkable into something textured, absorbing, and darkly funny. When she writes a book about modern heterosexual marriage, you don’t roll your eyes; you clear your schedule ... Fleishman Is in Trouble is a novel about how we don’t really see women for who they are. The real mystery of the book is: what are women really up to? Who are they really? ... In Brodesser-Akner’s hands, it matters less what the answer is than how rarely we bother to ask it, and to really listen when they respond. Beneath the surface of Toby’s life, another story simmers: Who are the women around him, and why aren’t we paying attention to their lives? Instead, what we pay attention to is how women reflect men to us, how they vouch for him or hurt him or apologize for him ... I was waiting ― it’s impossible not to ― for these women to step out of the background, especially the much-maligned, ever-absent Rachel. I was desperate to hear what she had to say about herself.
...an energetic, funny midlife crisis story, moored in the so-called First World problems of putatively successful American Jews. It’s most winning when offering finely tuned, well-earned social observations of Gen X, now all grown up ... If at this point you are wondering why, in 2019, you would want to read the story of a wealthy, white nebbish experiencing what, by the standards of most people who don’t earn a quarter of a million dollars every year, is a mildly inconvenient summer, you’re not alone: the novel itself often gives the impression that it would rather concentrate on the challenges facing Rachel, or on Toby’s friend Libby, a recovering journalist and the novel’s narrator, but is stuck instead with Toby ... the novel is more sure of itself is in its handling of Jewishness. Fleishman Is in Trouble takes pains to position itself within a Jewish American literary tradition ... Enlivened by a reporter’s eye for detail, and charming even when exploring overly familiar territory, Fleishman Is in Trouble might ultimately be most memorable for the way it offers a counterweight to an old, persistent Jewish narrative about marriage...which tells us that the most (perhaps, only) important thing about a Jewish person is whom they marry.
Early on, Fleishman Is In Trouble reads like a standard contemporary divorce novel, albeit a witty and nicely written one ... But hidden on the bottom of the first page, there’s a hint that something different is going on in this book ... The more we hear Toby’s account of all of Rachel’s sins, the harder it becomes to ignore the idea that perhaps Toby is the one who is not understanding something basic and fundamental, that perhaps the heart of the story — the most important thing here — has nothing to do with him at all. That’s the Taffy Brodesser-Akner trick, the thing that makes her profiles so clear-eyed and important, the thing that lifts her divorce novel head and shoulders above so many others in its genre: She is always willing to extend her empathy to people we are trained to believe are not worthy of our consideration. She is always willing to treat them as real people.
...it was on page 266, around the time that the titular Fleishman finds himself stunned that a friend 'had such a depth of understanding of his place in the world,' that I figured out what the novel was trying to do. It was so very tragic that I hardly knew how to move on with my day ... The first third of Fleishman Is in Trouble reads like a smart but somewhat boring novel ... What results is an examination of power and gender that, because it is easy to read, somewhat masks its own intricacy. Fleishman Is in Trouble is a book by a woman in which a woman tells the story of a man in order to tell the story of another woman ... Once you look at it closely, Fleishman Is in Trouble isn’t actually a book in which a woman tells the story of another woman by telling the story of a man. It’s a book in which many, many permutations of this triangulated storytelling unfold.
... reflect[s] the irrelevance of Jewishness to the most pressing concerns in many American Jews’ lives with refreshing honesty ... an energetic, funny midlife crisis story, moored in the so-called First World problems of putatively successful American Jews. It’s most winning when offering finely tuned, well-earned social observations of Gen X, now all grown up ... One of Brodesser-Akner’s chapter titles even delivers a shock reminiscent of those parables used to highlight unconscious gender bias. As with such pedagogical exercises, there’s something pat and vaguely unsatisfying about all this—I sometimes found myself wishing that Libby would tell her own story, rather than Toby’s. That would have felt more timely, at least. Libby’s decision, late in the novel, to break with the ethos of macho journalism by telling 'both sides of the story'—Rachel’s as well as Toby’s—feels well-intentioned but insufficient ... where the novel is more sure of itself is in its handling of Jewishness. Fleishman Is in Trouble takes pains to position itself within a Jewish American literary tradition ... what excites me, as someone who reads a lot of contemporary Jewish novels, is that Brodesser-Akner avoids an all-too-common Jewish literary cliché, which is the notion that a solution to all the characters’ problems can be found in a recovered historical document or implausible religious ritual ... Enlivened by a reporter’s eye for detail, and charming even when exploring overly familiar territory, Fleishman Is in Trouble might ultimately be most memorable for the way it offers a counterweight to an old, persistent Jewish narrative about marriage ... understands that when it comes to marriage and divorce, Jewish people are just people, like everybody else.
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.
A book that delves deep into the gender inequalities of sex, marriage, divorce and online dating in modern day New York, it is teeming with insights and humour, a genuine tour-de-force ... The style can feel too busy at times, with a dense narrative structure that works well to get in different perspectives but also draws attention to the artifice of the novel ... gives an enticing fly-on-the-wall feel to proceedings, and says much about the marginalisation of women and mothers, but it’s also a stretch that Libby could possibly know all the details, dialogue and interior monologues of her friend. The frame takes us outside the story, which is perhaps the point – likeable, everyman Toby is giving us a one-sided view of the breakdown of his marriage ... There is plenty of humour throughout, but the heft comes from Brodesser-Akner’s analysis of a marriage breakdown ... There are so many quotable lines and observations that the reader may feel dizzy by the end ... the real success of the book, the reason it is justifiably being touted as a Great Novel, is that it makes us take stock and appreciate what we have even as it shows us how easily things fall apart. For all its entertainment value and virtuoso writing, readers will remember Fleishman is in Trouble for its chastening lessons.
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!
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.
