April 1, 2019
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.
Starred review from May 1, 2019
When Toby Fleishman's soon-to-be-ex-wife Rachel drops their two kids at his place a day early, it does more than interrupt his hyperactive, app-fueled sexual rebounding. It confirms what he's long known: that Rachel's demanding job makes her self-involved, at best, or she's just not interested in their family, at worst. When she fails to pick them up as scheduled, things quickly get desperate. At a certain point, readers will note that maybe Toby loves being mad at Rachel a little too much, and suspect that, perhaps, there's more to the story. The book's narrator, a wonderful character whose identity is best discovered on the page, empathically tells all?reams of personal histories tangled by ambition, gender, family, class, and, especially, love. A New York Times journalist known for her incisive, entertaining profiles, 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
Starred review from March 15, 2019
It's not like Fleishman's estranged wife, a high-powered talent agent, was ever a very involved mother. But now she's dropped off the kids--while he was asleep--and disappeared.New York Times Magazine staff writer Brodesser-Akner's debut novel tracks Manhattan hepatologist Toby Fleishman through a painful divorce whose sting is mitigated somewhat by the wonders of his dating app. "Toby changed his search parameters to thirty-eight to forty-one, then forty to fifty, what the hell, and it was there that he found his gold mine: endlessly horny, sexually curious women who knew their value, who were feeling out something new, and whose faces didn't force him to have existential questions about youth and responsibility." About 30 pages in, we learn that the narrator is an old friend named Elizabeth "Libby" Slater, whom he met when both were college students on a year abroad in Israel. After the separation, his therapist advised Toby to reconnect with old friends; not having heard from him in years, Libby is at first nonplussed when he calls. A magazine journalist with a stalled career, she lives out in New Jersey, where she's no happier with motherhood than Toby's ex--she describes another male friend's future marriage as "He [would] find someone young and take her life away by finally having children." Toby Fleishman is a man plagued by his height (or at least he is in Libby's account; this narrative strategy raises questions), and he has never recovered from being chubby as a child; he's on a permanent no-carb, no-fat, no-sugar diet which qualifies as an eating disorder. He's a devoted father, but he's also a doctor who's angling for promotion and a man who's trying to take advantage of the unbridled lust of middle-aged women, so his wife's mysterious disappearance is infuriating. And a little scary. 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!
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