Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019) Fleishman is in Trouble.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019) Fleishman is in Trouble.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman is in Trouble, is no trouble to read. It’s pretty much perfect.  

I’m pretty much tempted to leave it at that and let the book speak of itself. But I’ll say a bit more.

No prologue. Just a one line invitation: ‘Summon your witnesses.’ Aeschylus.

It begins at the beginning, of course, but in medias res, which is a fancy way of saying, in the middle of things. Toby Fleishman, aged 41, is at home. Home is New York City. He’s a senior doctor, whose speciality is liver diseases. But not senior enough for his wife, Rachel. He makes around $250 000 a years. She makes four or five times as much as her husband and runs her own agency representing actors and screenwriters.

Money talks and she’s walked. They’re divorcing. Rachel didn’t stick to their arrangement. She dropped the kids off, Solly aged nine and Rachel, twelve, at his place. She still had a key and even though it’s 4am, and even though Toby wasn’t meant to be getting them until Saturday.

“He called her. ‘What were you thinking?’ he whisper-hissed into the phone.

What if I’d gone out and not realised they were there?’

‘That’s why I texted you.’    

‘You can’t pull that kind of shit, Rachel.’ He only said her name at the end of a sentence now. Rachel.”

Rachel is portrayed as a bitch (summon your witnesses). All ex-wives are. It’s the nature of the beast. Toby is trying to enjoy his new-found freedom. He’s discovered apps. Dating apps. And he’s found  that half the women in New York want to fuck him, or  least give him a hand-job. He’s rediscovering the youth he never had before he married Rachel. He’d desirable.

His pal Seth is there to guide him. He’s fucked every woman they’ve ever met and some he hasn’t. The length of his relationships tended to be as long as Leonardo DiCaprio’s dates with a woman over 23. But even Seth is settling down.

They’re old college friends. They went to Israel together with another old friend. Elizabeth (Libby) Epstein. Toby and Libby nearly had a thing going. Sometimes Libby thinks about that. She’s in her forties too. Married with two kids. The what-might-have beens. Before she became invisible. As married women that age do.

Libby is the omniscient narrator of their story and her own story within the narrative. Her goal as a writer is to bring forward the witnesses, but not just to interrogate.

   T.S. Eliot's poem "Little Gidding", which is the fourth and final poem in his collection "Four Quartets". The relevant lines for in medias resness are:

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

Read on.