This was who Seth was going to marry. But here’s what he didn’t know, I told him, and he would learn: A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger. It’s like hating your own finger after it becomes necrotic. You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement. You’re hating your creation. You’re hating yourself.
Toby Fleishman is in trouble, but so is everyone else in this novel. It takes a little while to realize the seriousness of the trouble, because Brodesser-Akner presents it in comic terms for the first three quarters of the novel. That comedy is fun, but when things turn serious, they disappoint.
Toby is separated from Rachel – their final divorce papers will appear in the second half of the novel – and he is just getting the hang of separation. That means he is just beginning to date. In the world of this novel – a very wealthy and privileged slice of Manhattan – that means that Toby, a short, balding, 41 years old with two kids, low self-esteem and a very demanding job, is having more sex than he ever imagined possible. He has a wide variety of apps that allow him to preview, chat with, and select potential partners and virtually all of them want no-strings-attached sex. Phone sex, text sex, quickies in the hall, mad romps on the floor, anything that is neither demanding nor emotionally involved.
His trouble seems at first to center around whether he can balance the time required to harvest all this pleasure with the time he wants to put into raising his children and being a top liver specialist at NYU Medical Center. This is made more difficult because Rachel is presented as a narcissistic, greedy and overly ambitious woman who cares little for her children. We are told that Rachel’s was always the primary career in the family, that she makes many times Toby’s salary and was driven always to make her business larger and more lucrative. That early portrait is confirmed when – after dumping the kids on Toby so she can go on a yoga retreat – she disappears from their lives. She returns from the weekend but never comes to pick up the kids or return Toby’s calls. He makes moves to jettison her completely from his life and become a single father. These attempts seem sincere – he takes time off from work and loses out on a promotion as a result.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, Toby meets Nahid, the one sexual powerhouse from his internet dating who seems to connect on an emotional level, and for a time it seems that Fleishman will pull out of the trouble and lead a happy life, without Rachel.
Around this time, the narrative changes in two ways: first, we begin to focus on the life and moods of our narrator. For the first 50-60 pages, the novel appears to have a limited omniscient narrator who is following Toby’s thoughts and moods, knows the history of his marriage, the intimate details of his children’s birth, the conversations and fights that are milestones in both the deepening and the devolution of his relationship to Rachel. But then it becomes clear that the narrator is a character in the story – one Libby who, along with Seth, is an old friend of Toby’s from pre-Rachel days. We begin to learn of Libby’s complex relationship with these two men, Seth and Toby and of her own struggles with career and family. While Libby is on a vacation from her strained marriage, she bumps into the long-absent Rachel and discovers that Rachel has not abandoned her family, but had a full nervous breakdown from the strain of her divorce and the pressure of trying to be the main bread winner for 14 years. She is a flawed, but far more sympathetic person than Libby (who has only known Toby’s side of things) has believed. Libby makes sure Rachel gets the help she needs, then returns to her own long-suffering husband; Toby realizes that Nahid is just as flawed as any other human and Seth plans to marry for the first time in spite of what he has seen from these friends.
Then novel ends with several pages of Libby’s reflections on marriage – including the analysis of Seth’s situation quoted above. (He has delayed marriage into his 40s, but is now marrying a beautiful 27-year-old.) That reflection is serious and offers some interesting and thoughtful ideas about the challenges and rewards of spending decades in an intimate relationship with someone as complex and flawed as you yourself likely are. It almost makes me take the rest of this seriously, but there has been too much breezily taken for granted for me to fully buy this turn of events.
The feminist turn here – that Rachel is not a total bitch, that Toby’s sexual escapades are a childish male fantasy, that women are under enormous pressure to claim it all and that it is wives who bear much of the burden of marriages complexity – can only be revelatory if you believed something different at any point in the novel. The first third of the book, when all Fleishman’s trouble seems to be libidinal, was only interesting because it was written by a woman. It was a great male fantasy and it was written with humor and energy – I breezed through it. The list of slogans on women’s t-shirts alone provides enough jokes to carry a novel. But it was never believable or challenging or interesting in any serious way. Nor was Libby to be taken seriously as a narrator. There is not the slightest attempt to explain how she knows so much about Toby’s life, or why, having intensely disliked and avoided Rachel for 15 years, she is the one person capable of really understanding and helping her.
The fact that these basic elements are not plausible is layered on the hyperbolic focus on wealthy Manhattanites here. Toby is a well-respected specialist at NYU, the kind of person a hedge fund manager calls in when his wife is sick, but he is the underpaid person whose career allows time for his children? Rachel’s salary is many times his, but even with their combined income, they are the poor relations in their social group? It is not a question of whether these conditions are possible, but whether they make fertile ground for a serious novel about relationships. And in the end, Brodesser-Akner is attempting a serious novel about relationships. The reading is entertaining and some of this is funny, and when it was just going to be that, I enjoyed it. But as she turns towards tragedy, the breach between the reader’s pleasure and the reader’s trust grows too wide.
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