Fleishman Is in Trouble
A Novel
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3.9 • 1.3K Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “A masterpiece” (NPR) about marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition
Now an Emmy Award–nominated 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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When it comes to marriage, how miserable is too miserable? That’s the thorny question driving Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s wonderfully astute and unpredictable debut novel. Toby Fleishman has just discovered the easy intimacy of dating apps when his ex-wife, Rachel, abruptly disappears, leaving him with their two children. At first, you might peg Rachel as a career-driven monster, but as fans of Brodesser-Akner’s shrewd celebrity profiles know, looks can be deceiving. Guided by the mystery of Rachel’s whereabouts and her own thwarted ambition, Toby’s pal Libby ends up searching for the less-convenient truth behind the couple’s breakup. Fleishman Is in Trouble is the stealth feminist manifesto we didn’t know we needed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Good but Long
This book is good in the sense that the characters progress, solid plot, and it’s relatable to anyone who is married/divorced or has children. It is pretty long for the type of book it is though.
Fleishman Is In Trouble
This was another Gone Girl book, and I skipped most of it.
The existentialism of our time
… everything is great and nothing is great. This book perfectly reflects the existentialism of traditionalism without the “buy in” to conventionalism… and the cracks that this created in a modern marriage. Fantastic.