Taffy Brodesser-Akner

It's hard to believe that Taffy Brodesser-Akner's FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE is her first novel, because it's just so damn GOOD! I mean, from page one it so totally sucked me in, which is probably a good description, because her style is very (Philip)Roth-ian, or Roth-esque, or whatever. Meaning there's lots of sex, of all kinds. Like she spent her younger years peering over Roth's shoulder as he wrote some of his juiciest old-white-guy material. Because she certainly knows Roth, who even gets show more a token mention, as one of the authors (along with Bellow) that her protagonist, Dr Toby Fleishman, imagined his ideal woman might be reading when he would first meet her. Which didn't happen, of course. Instead he met Rachel, fell in love and married her. And now, fifteen years and two kids later, their marriage is almost over. They are separated. She got everything. He gets the kids every other weekend. The Fleishmans are in trouble. Yes, both of them. Because this is a book about the dissolution of a marriage, about how hard it is to stay in love, about differing goals and dreams and ambitions, about parenting by the seat of your pants, social climbing, and about starting over, at forty-one, in the age of smart phones and dating apps - and pornographic pics sent from interested women. Toby is wallowing in all of this fresh fleish, er, flesh, and still trying to be a responsible father to his eleven year-old daughter, Hannah, who is already feeling prepubescent pangs of puppy love, and sensitive nine year-old Solly.

So yeah, initially you think this story is all about Toby, with an omniscient narrator. Then suddenly this narrator becomes Libby, Toby's longtime friend from college, who might have been his girlfriend, except for the fact that Toby is only five foot four, a disadvantage he is all too aware of. Toby and Libby and Seth, still a libertine bachelor, were a tight threesome in college, and have stayed in touch intermittently. Libby, we learn, married with children, has given up her job as a writer for a men's magazine to be a stay-at-home mom. Discontented, she wants to be a writer, but, after some false starts, she discovers -

"My voice only came alive when I was talking about someone else; my ability to see the truth and to extrapolate human emotion based on what I saw and was told didn't extend to myself.

Hence, voila! She becomes the voice of Toby's story and Rachel's, and Seth's. And her story is dropped in there too, eventually. It's complicated. And much of Libby's discontent comes from her realization that -

"There were so many ways of being a woman in the world, but all of them still rendered her just a woman, which is to say: a target."

Toby's story - and Rachel's too - as Libby presents them, are sad and painful, and hard to look away from. And the effects on the children are equally tragic. Because all the Fleishmans are in trouble. Marriage is hard, but separation and divorce are even harder.

I've read a lot of Philip Roth over the years, and so, apparently, has Brodesser-Akner. One of my favorite Roth novels is his first, the often overlooked coming-of-age LETTING GO. It is very similar to this book in that it alternates between an omniscient narrator and a first-person in the voice of protagonist Gabe Wallach. And a major female character in LETTING GO, is named Libby, a married woman Gabe is more than a little in love with. So yeah, I suspect Taffy Brodesser-Akner is very much a student of Philip Roth's work, and, as a result, she has crafted a multi-faceted masterpiece on the pleasures and perils of men and women falling in love and out of love, marriage and divorce, lust and longing and so many other things. I loved this book. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

This was an intense read, the inner monologues, the anxiety is just unrelenting for page after page after page. I was engaged, and intrigued but it did start to weigh on me, maybe that's the point. I mean, it's also entirely brilliant because the specifics of the thoughts, of the feelings that you are peering into is so well observed. If you read it, I wonder what you felt at the end, what's the takeaway? There's certainly a lot to reflect on and discuss here, and I'm still not sure how to show more process where the story took me as the book concluded. show less

In the first pew, Beamer and Jenny couldn't move. They had watched all this, as the understanding of what had really gone wrong in their lives revealed itself to them, which was that the tide pool you're born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons. Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see normal people.

When wealthy factory owner Carl Fletcher is kidnapped and held for two weeks in 1980, the impact of that event will be felt in the show more Fletcher family for the rest of Carl's life and longer. His wife is no longer able to parent the two small children she already has, and the one born shortly after the kidnapping, instead giving everything to protecting a deeply damaged Carl. The three siblings have all the advantages of great wealth and all the disadvantages of growing up in a dysfunctional home, with a barely functioning father and a mother and grandmother intent only on caring for him. So Nathan ends up an anxiety-filled worrier, Beamer addicted to drugs and expensive sexual habits, and Jenny performs as the good girl until she discovers activism and dives into that. They are all unlikeable and damaged and certain they deserve better, or at least certain they deserve more money.

It is entertaining to read about wealthy people leading unhappy lives, and Brodesser-Akner writes so well and is so willing to keep piling things on top of her characters that the novel has a propulsive energy, even as I kept wondering why I was spending so much time with terrible people. And they are all terrible, even as the author shows why and how they ended up that way. And the final section of the book pulls everything together brilliantly. I don't like reading about wealthy people, but Brodesser-Akner has such a talent for delving into monied waters that I'll no doubt grab her next novel as well. show less

Toby, Libby, and Seth meet on their Junior year abroad in Israel. There they form a bond that, despite distance and forgetfulness, holds firm and brings them back together in the year of Toby’s divorce, of Seth’s engagement, and Libby’s estrangement from her suburban existence. Toby is going through hell. Or he’s putting himself through hell. Or he’s putting everyone else through hell. In any case, this appears to be a novel about Toby — close third-person narration, so close show more it’s inside Toby’s thoughts. Or it seems to be about Toby until the narration switches to first-person from Libby’s perspective and you realize that she’s the one who has been writing Toby’s life. It’s disorienting. I assume it’s meant to be. And then the first-person narrative just drifts off and you get thoroughly immersed again in that close third-person view of Toby’s disastrous marriage. And then back. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax.

This is a fascinating read. And not just because of the narrative complexity (though, yes, mostly). There is a withering view of the current state of male-female relations and the negotiations that facilitate our compromises. Withering but also at times optimistic. Or is that optimism just optimistic? It’s hard to know. At times things seem excruciatingly real. But at others the narrator just seems to be ranting. Which narrator? See, I told you it was confusing. But also exhilarating.

Ultimately the problems of these excessively wealthy New Yorkers (Toby is the poor man of the bunch, a medical specialist who only brings in $268,000 per year!) can seem distant and self-inflicted. But then maybe all of our problems are like that.

Warmly recommended. show less