Tournament of Books discussion

location to discuss Fleishman.. inclusion in the short list and general thoughts on the book

I've started this book as a library ebook twice only to get distracted and have it expire on me, and then I have to wait on hold for a while. I read a review that made me want to try again, it said the ending made it worth it, so I did something I never do - I read the ending. It made me curious to try. Maybe third time is a charm?

Jenny (Reading Envy) wrote: "I've started this book as a library ebook twice only to get distracted and have it expire on me, and then I have to wait on hold for a while. I read a review that made me want to try again, it said..."

I really liked this one, Jenny, although I know several here didn't. Maybe it just came to me at the right time (I read this immediately after reading the devastating On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and I needed this palate cleansing. But I thought the voices were so engaging, and the character switch in the second half was handled so well. The Fleishman sections reminded me so much of Jonathan Tropper (who I adore), a perfect mix of humor and pathos, which is my favorite kind of writing.

As a divorce lawyer this book helped me understand the emotional aspect of a divorce from a client's perspective. I liked it and hope it does well in the Tournament.

I nearly threw this book against the wall several times for most of the first fifty or so pages but something (great reviews? One of which talked about hating the beginning) made me hang in there. I ended up really liking it.

I agree with everyone else that this one is worth reading through to the end even if you don't love the beginning. While I didn't hate the start of the novel, I really loved the last part. I thought the perspective shift was so smartly done.

As for what I didn't love about it, I did find the jumps to the narrator way too jarring at times. Also, this book is way longer than it needed to be as some of the ideas were repeated too much, in my opinion. But still, the ending is so good. Definitely worth a read.

Karissa wrote: "As for what I didn't love about it, I did find the jumps to the narrator way too jarring at times. Also, this book is way longer than it needed to be as some of the ideas were repeated too much, in my opinion. But still, the ending is so good. Definitely worth a read..."

I listened to the audiobook on this one and the narrator is a woman from the beginning. I think that helped to make the shift from Toby to the Narrator (I'm blanking on the name right now) more seamless. The structure of this book works very well in audio.

I really wonder why the book was all told from the friend's POV...It was very disorienting to read thinking you were in Toby's head (How did she get into Toby's head??) and then find out it was someone else portraying him.

That aspect didn't work for me at all, but I really liked the book regardless. I especially admired how your perspective of the situation and characters completely shifts in the second half, and how she manages to make characters who are pretty unlikable still very sympathetic.

I finished it the other night and was generally impressed - beginning it, I didn't think there was a way that the author could make Rachel's actions anywhere near sympathetic. Of course, both points of view have their own biases - I don't think either of them were entirely in the right - but it felt pretty honest and real by the end. (It also touched on a few sensitive feelings I have as a husband/dad whose wife works super hard.)

I think this book is as tricky as Trust Exercise. I really disliked Toby from the beginning and couldn't figure out why. I think the author is playing with the reader's gender bias from page one. How each reader interprets the book will depend on their own experience.

I admit my bias going in comes from a bitter place, so take that grain of salt. I don't really see that Toby had much to complain about. Had he been female, he would have just DONE it (the career, the cooking, the sympathetic ear for the kids) plus a whole lot more. And he would have considered himself lucky.

I look forward to the commentary on this one. I think it should be pretty lively.

Ruthiella wrote: "I look forward to the commentary on this one. I think it should be pretty lively...."

Yes, "lively" is a great word for it! I will be there for that! I did like the final part of the novel best and I wonder if I might have liked the novel more if that section had been delivered in bits through the rest of the novel so that I could be asked to find some sympathy for Toby before I was rolling my eyes at him.

Elizabeth wrote: "I really wonder why the book was all told from the friend's POV...It was very disorienting to read thinking you were in Toby's head (How did she get into Toby's head??) and then find out it was som..."

I thought it worked really well; gender and whose story gets told is really central to the book. This book is just as much about the narrator Libby as it is about Toby. The narrator herself says that the only way a woman's story gets told is through a man's story: "That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman—to tell her story through a man; Trojan horse yourself into a man, and people would give a shit about you." She also admits to not being able to write about herself well or creatively: "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." You hear a lot about Toby's crisis during this summer, and eventually about Rachel's, but the narrator is having one, too, but it's one she feels she can't talk about.

She also calls her thoughts and involvement in Toby's life during the summer this is set an "obsession"--talking about the moment she meets Rachel, she writes, "What do you do when you run into a ghost who had recently been the object of your summertime obsession?" She's sitting at home dissatisfied with her own life after having left her career as a journalist, by her own account obsessing over the details, she's been talking to him every night or nearly so, he's been showing her his phone with all the sexts and pictures... I think it would be pretty easy for her to get into his head, while also understand that she's taking some poetic license with it, as a journalist (as she also admitted she had done in her journalistic career before: "So I wrote heartfelt stories about their lives, extrapolating from what they gave me and running with what I already knew from being human. They sent me texts and flowers that told me I really understood them in a way that no one had before").

I know it didn't work for a lot of people, but I loved Libby as the narrator and I think it added a lot of depth to the book overall.

Alison wrote: "I wonder if I might have liked the novel more if that section had been delivered in bits through the rest of the novel so that I could be asked to find some sympathy for Toby before I was rolling my eyes at him."

I'm curious if you mean you would have had more sympathy for Toby if you'd heard about Rachel's nervous breakdown first (or during)?

Paige wrote: "I'm curious if you mean you would have had more sympathy for Toby if you'd heard about Rachel's nervous breakdown first (or during)? ..."

That and knowing Toby's history earlier in the tale. By the time I reached the parts that portrayed him sympathetically, I was too far past the point of being able to pivot. I get that NYC is different, but the poor-Toby-is-poor irked.

Ruthiella wrote: "I think this book is as tricky as Trust Exercise. I really disliked Toby from the beginning and couldn't figure out why. I think the author is playing with the reader's gender bias from page one..."

This is so interesting, Ruthiella. My current gender bias in reading is so strong that when I first picked this book up from the "new fiction" shelf and read the blurb, I put it down without reading the first sentence, because I'm just not interested in a story about a rich divorced man.

It's taken me the longest time to say, 'wait, it's written by a woman' or 'maybe there is more to the story than the usual.'

Lark wrote: "My current gender bias in reading is so strong that when I first picked this book up from the "new fiction" shelf and read the blurb, I put it down without reading the first sentence, because I'm just not interested in a story about a rich divorced man."

I had this bias too, until I persuaded myself to do a GR group read of The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Dennis Johnson. All of the stories aren't about rich men, but they all have a distinctively masculine voice that I surprised myself by liking.

Alison wrote: "Paige wrote: "I'm curious if you mean you would have had more sympathy for Toby if you'd heard about Rachel's nervous breakdown first (or during)? ..."

That and knowing Toby's history earlier in t..."

Interesting! I thought the author did a good job of trying to make him seem somewhat sympathetic in the beginning, before slowly revealing him to not be all that great (of course, the signs are there from the beginning, and a lot of readers—especially TOB readers—will see the red flags, but I think a lot of people might miss them before the bigger reveal that hey, he punches walls and throws glasses in front of his children and screams at his wife in front of his family and manipulates his children into caretaking his emotions, etc, before Rachel's "side" drives the point home that he's not entirely sympathetic). But I mostly think that in the beginning he is meant to appear sympathetic in relation to his marriage dynamic, not so much his finances. I have no sympathy over the "poor" aspect; having lived many years of my life under (sometimes far under) the poverty line, I have pretty much no sympathy for the great majority of people’s ~money troubles~. My husband laughs at me because we’ll be reading something together and so often my analysis just boils down to "gee their relation to money is whack." So there was definitely a lot of eye-rolling about Toby and Rachel's (and everybody else's) money stuff on my end too.

I also think having the additional female narrator, who also had a bias from being Toby's friend, added a lot of interesting layers to the novel. She's dealing with her own issues, which affect how she tells the Fleishmans' story. And then we readers all come with our own biases that affect our reading of the characters. I agree with Ruthiella that it is as tricky as Trust Exercise, possibly trickier because with Trust Exercise we get clean delineations of perspective. Here, it's an outside perspective layered over everything else.

The whole book to me ended up feeling like a constant subversion and re-examination of gender biases, yet it's not so simple as a role reversal in which Rachel acts like the stereotypical man and Toby the stereotypical woman. Rachel has some problems that are very specific to women, and that can't be dismissed. It's a book that begs for discussion, which makes me glad it's in the TOB.

Paige wrote: "Interesting! I thought the author did a good job of trying to make him seem somewhat sympathetic in the beginning, before slowly revealing him to not be all that great ..."

Yeah, I'll second this. I'm saving most of my comments for the tourney, but I think it is pretty clear that we were supposed to align with Toby at first, and then start to feel uncomfortable about it as the clues began to accumulate.

https://twitter.com/taffyakner/status...

Jason wrote: "https://twitter.com/taffyakner/status..."

Oh no...I can just see it now, simplified into vacuous one-liners. (Although what the hell, I’d probably still go to see it.)

I broke my rule on reading books about the inner lives of rich New Yorkers, and I regret it. Yawn. Two awful self-involved people. Yawn. Fates and Furies except even more irritating.

Also, the author really got a lot of things wrong about the medical profession, and the hospital scenes were just not realistic enough and it pissed me off. Like, fellows have already completed a full residency and are full doctors and not newby interns who can barely treat a patient (and there's not even an accredited hepatology fellowship (although some hospitals do have one combined with gastro), the department hierarchy portrayed (Toby called his department chair, a fellow doctor, "sir") is entirely unrealistic and that's not how promotions work at hospitals ... OK, rant over, but I hate when authors try to portray a profession they can't be bothered to understand.

I read Part 1. It was ok, but I felt unmotivated to continue. DNF pile for me.

Paige wrote: "Elizabeth wrote: "I really wonder why the book was all told from the friend's POV...It was very disorienting to read thinking you were in Toby's head (How did she get into Toby's head??) and then f..."

since finishing this a few weeks ago, I feel more and more the author accomplished an amazing magic trick; she Trojan-horsed a woman's experience onto Toby so men/publishing houses would actually read it AND simultaneously told the story of 'when the female takes the typical-male story in the world she's screwed there too'. (+ all the perks this unicorn man gets in the typical-female role are NOT reaped by females). Even when she tells you what she's doing it still surprises. Instead of picking a side in this marital saga, I warmed to the topic of how fundamentally sexist men AND women are to females in OR out of traditional roles ('we're all working mothers Rebecca' [insert primal scream here]).

I listened to this as an audiobook, and I loved it in that format. Because Libby is the narrator, it’s impossible to forget that we’re looking through her lens because it’s her voice that tells the story of Toby and Rachel. It’s a nice, complex layering effect that may not be as noticeable in print. All in all, I really got a lot out of this book, perhaps especially because I have a very demanding career myself and have some of the same home “frictions” that Toby/Rachel have.

What I really liked about this story is how Fleishman appears to reject the trappings of the wealthy noting their wants are insatiable.

No, inside those columned, great-lawned homes were pirates for whom there was never enough. There was never enough money, goods, clothing, safety, security, club memberships, bottles of old wine. There was not a number at which anyone said, “I have a good life. I’d like to see if I can help someone else have a good life.” These were criminals—yes, most of them were real, live criminals. Not always with jailable offenses, but certainly morally abhorrent ones: They had offshore accounts or they underpaid their assistants or they didn’t pay taxes on their housekeepers or they were NRA members.

Fleishman accepted that he was where he wanted to be and was not interested in further social climbing. "Can you imagine what it’s like to have arrived where you want to be at such a young age? That was what she never understood: that ambition didn’t always run uphill. Sometimes, when you were happy, it jogged in place."

He seems to get such emotional clarity. "You couldn’t go to buy a house in the Hamptons and then wonder who you were. You were one of them. How had he missed all of this? God, what an idiot he was."

I also found many of Fleishman's narratives about divorce to be spot on: "How could it be that you take extremely difficult, extremely healthy steps to get your life in order only to have the person you extracted yourself from more in charge of your happiness and well-being than she ever was?"

I also really liked how his best friend as the narrator discussing Rachel expounds on sexism in the work place and life in general. "The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older." She recognized how Rachel stopped playing the game and got punished.

Overall, I think this novel is very worthy of being on the TOB's shortlist.

I just finished this yesterday, and it was quite a mixed bag for me. I listened to it, and agree with Gwendolyn and Amanda that it was an effective format for this story.

Right off the bat I noticed that this story checked multiple boxes for the things that I have little to no interest in: wealthy people and their complaints, people's sex lives, wealthy people trying to impress wealthier people (and those social circles/hierarchies), etc. The story was able to hold my attention though, and I appreciated that it touched on topics that I had more interest in like gender roles/discrimination, nervous breakdowns, parenthood and marriage/divorce complexities, etc.

Having Libby as the narrator was definitely helpful. If this whole story were told from Toby's perspective it would have received a huge eye roll and one-star rating from me. I didn't like or have much sympathy for Toby or Rachel, but the bits we got about Libby were intriguing enough for me to connect with her a bit. A few here mentioned the strong ending, where Libby digs into the issues and bigger picture concepts... it definitely picked up for me at that point, and more of that throughout the story would have been nice. Overall I found this to be a fairly accurate and fair portrayal of a marriage falling apart where both sides have their issues.

Y'all have touched on most of my thoughts above:
Erin - thanks for pulling out those quotes; I appreciated those after being fairly annoyed by the wealth mentioned throughout the whole story. Zero sympathy for a doctor who makes $250k+ AND gets child support checks over $7k each month. WTF?

Paige and Teresa - you both pointed out some of the more notable parts of this story related to the gender issues.

Ruthiella and Lark - yep, I had similar biases from the start.

Elizabeth - I agree that it's a good palate cleanser. I didn't enjoy it as much as you did, but it was easy to fly through it since I was engaged with the story.

Back to that ending though... I thought the last 20 minutes or so were really strong, but then the last line kind of threw it off for me. When that interesting perspective of the bigger picture and how Toby and Rachel will need to just move on and rebuild their lives ended with (view spoiler)[ Rachel showing up at the door I was confused. Did that mean she was there to explain things and then they would go their separate ways? Were we supposed to question if she was there to try to get him back and fix the marriage? (hide spoiler)] It felt like an unnecessary layer of ambiguity was added with that last line, where I thought the ambiguity that we were left with before it was just fine.

I came into this book with the lowest of expectations but ended up loving it. I agree with others that the audiobook's narrator helped solidify early on that this story wasn't only about Toby. I loved that it started out feeling like a trope-ish book but tackled some complex issues.

Lauren wrote: " It felt like an unnecessary layer of ambiguity was added with that last line, where I thought the ambiguity that we were left with before it was just fine. "

Lauren, my thoughts on the ending: (view spoiler)[Near the end when Libby tells Toby and Seth maybe she'll write a novel about their summer, they ask how it would end and comment on novels left with ambiguity. I didn't think at all that Rachel was there to reconcile or fix the marriage, but I did think it was a step towards reconciling with the children. That the ending doesn't involve her completely absent from their lives, but exactly what it does mean is intentionally ambiguous. (hide spoiler)]

I hope this crushes Normal People!

Bretnie wrote: "I came into this book with the lowest of expectations but ended up loving it. I agree with others that the audiobook's narrator helped solidify early on that this story wasn't only about Toby. I lo..."

That makes sense on the ending - thanks for sharing!

ok i HATED the start of this but I just got to the narrator shift.

Dear New York literary fiction authors, I promise that I understand and agree with the premise that women have inner lives and novels don't have to be about New York men's problems, you have permission to take that as given and stop writing cleverly subversive metafiction in order to make that point.

Caroline wrote: "Dear New York literary fiction authors, I promise that I understand and agree with the premise that women have inner lives..."

Yikes. I'm fairly certain that's not the point of this book....

I just felt hit over the head with 'this is starting out as a man's story but women have stories too' . . . like, okay, thank you, I was already aware?

Based on Taffi B-A's interviews, I'm fairly certain that was the point of the book.

So I finished it and -- this book keeps going on about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and, if this is the kind of stuff that is worrying somebody in the year of our lord two thousand twenty (two thousand nineteen, whatever, any time after 2016 anyway) -- then God bless them, I guess.

I don't think I'm projecting a feminist reading onto the text so much as reading what Libby's narration keeps explicitly telling us. And I have to say, I basically agree with her worldview here, I just don't feel like I need to be told. . .

Re: comparing it to other books, I just wrote this in my review:

Women figuring out how to deal with men's stories and ways of storytelling is a topic worth grappling with, but I thought Sigrid Nunes's 'The Friend' did a much more satisfying job, and Lauren Groff's 'Fates and Furies' did -- well basically exactly the same thing as 'Fleishman', and didn't particularly work for me then either.

It might just be that Libby's voice is essentially telling me everything that I believe to be true about relationships, in my darkest and most bitter moments, and I don't need to spend fourteen hours reading that. . .

The question of how reliable LIBBY is meant to be might be another issue, and I'm just grooving along with her because she's confirming my priors.

(Re: how sympathetic Toby is, I honestly side with him on a lot of the relationship -- she keeps saying he likes and accepts the nice things, but he seems like he'd be perfectly happy as a family doctor not in New York --and understand his reaction to her disappearance, but not his uncaringness when Libby tells him what really happened.)

Yeah I absolutely think Libby tells knocks us on the head with the “swap out Toby for any woman” voila moment but I was okay with that because I felt like it was written for the male audience/gaze (who I don’t think it would be as obvious without the call-out) while pointing out the ways in which the publishing industry will and will not market this (women’s fiction e.g.) simply because Toby is male and enough readers/publishers would not catch this. I don’t mind being part of the choir getting preached to as long as there are new converts in the audience. :)
Fates and Furies did the opposite for me - it secreted away the woman’s power to the 2nd half and then stole it/undermined it again almost as soon as her secret power was revealed. It ended up being very male gaze

I could see that, I just don't know any men who read books like this. I hope they get something out of it :D :D

Kelly wrote: "Based on Taffi B-A's interviews, I'm fairly certain that was the point of the book."

Hmm. I took that challenge, and just read the first 13 interviews with Taffi Brodesser-Akner about her novel that came up in my web search. And I didn't find any suggestion that this was just "women have inner lives, too."

What I found was that she was writing about divorce, ('Someone casually said to my husband, ‘Is it okay with you that she’s writing a book about the divorce?’ Like so many other people, their first novel is a coming-of-age novel … And he said, ‘She’s obsessed with divorce. She has always been obsessed with divorce. Her whole family is divorced. Some of them are divorced twice.’ Like, this is it. This has nothing to do with me.')

about modern dating ("No one was coy. No one was flirtatious. They just went for it. I wanted to tell the story of what it is like now").

She says "putting a problem in the not-usually-oppressed person’s hands is a really easy way for people to understand it" and "Around the time I was writing this, I was suddenly aware of a lot of inequity. I felt very loved and treasured [at my job], but then I would get wind of certain salaries, and I would see how different it was for my husband. I grew up in a house with a single mother with lots of limits that looked like gender limits. So when you wake up to it, it’s all you can see. It was important for me to write a book that was relevant, modern and that showed that suddenly the world [can be] just completely different from what you’d pinned your hopes on."

She certainly writes about her character's inner lives ("These two characters are constantly accusing each other of being angry and then denying their own anger, passing it off as either sadness or frustration. Why can’t you just be angry? That is a really poignant question to me.”) but not with the end of 'women have inner lives, too.' She's more pointed than that, for example: 'the gendering of words like “crazy” and “psycho”, which are seldom attributed to men. “Nobody’s asking men about their emotional state because nobody’s out to judge them,” she explains. “Women are only asked about their emotional state so we can be reduced to it. So that sucks.”'

But it is a little difficult to know for certain from her interviews, because she's very conscious of the twists and change-ups in the narrative and doesn't want to spoil those for the reader ('She then implores me to “be discreet” when discussing the plot' says one interviewer).

Look, it's okay not to connect with a book - there have been plenty in the Tournament over the years which have inspired readers in ways that mystify me (see Kent Harouf). And you may not be interested in what Brodesser-Akner is exploring, or lit up by the way she is exploring it. But this novel is a whole lot more than "women have inner lives, too."

I'm glad you got something more out of the book, and I'm not suggesting there's nothing else there. What I'm responding to is the shape of the book, which spends A LOT OF TIME establishing an upfront narrative of a put upon man who believes he's been mistreated and ignored by a crazy wife, and then has a female narrator come into the narrative, wind in and out while commenting on how she has wrestled with why men's stories and framing of stories are viewed as more important and then gives us 'the truth' of the wife's story in the final segment. As someone who doesn't need to be teased and tricked and meta'ed at to get me to care about a women's point of view, a lot of this book was completely unnecessary to me as a reader.

Caroline wrote: "As someone who doesn't need to be teased and tricked and meta'ed at to get me to care about a women's point of view, a lot of this book was completely unnecessary to me as a reader."

Hmm. Obviously you and I aren't similar readers, but I'm surprised at this. The "teasing" and the "tricking" and the "meta-ing" are the art of the book. That's the part that I care about. I'm not reading literary fiction to make up for missing Sociology 101 in college or to learn about a woman's point of view. I'm reading literary fiction for the art - how the author handles her material. I'm as interested in how the message is delivered as in what the message is.

I get it: there are some forms that other people seem to like that do nothing for me. I'm not innocent of being dismissive of the books that don't light me up.

But the comment that got me rolling here seems a little too reductive of a complex narrative that is exploring a host of interrelated issues. And the follow ups 1) that the author declares it herself in interview, and 2) that all that literary stuff gets in the way of an otherwise banal revelation seem 1) pretty clearly not true, and 2) a misguided rationalization for the failure of this book to connect with you as a reader.

I'm not trying to change your mind about the book - but as a great deal of the point of this book was to play with gender role reversals, and to challenge our understanding of the "crazy ex" topos, and to ask us to think about (as TBA said in one of the 13 interviews I read, when talking about how she conducts interviews) how other people in a person's life might view them, the teasing and tricking and meta-ing are an integral part of the message. It's one thing to say that it doesn't do it well (although I would probably dispute some of that, too) or that it isn't the kind of thing that you like (chacun a son gout), but to suggest that it was somehow inessential, or worse, detracting from the novel's message seems ... well, seems worth contesting.

To me the reading and tricking and meta-ing are entirely in servicing of a banal and self evident message.

Hey Tim - while you make several salient points and I appreciated the quotes from the author interviews, I can absolutely see Caroline’s point and I’d much prefer to hear you say “oh wow, it really worked for me!” Instead of “I’m not trying to change your mind...[but you’re wrong].” Especially timely in a conversation about a book where everyone is fascinated to hear the perspectives of men and unable to care about those of women.

Amy wrote: "Hey Tim - ... I’d much prefer to hear you say “oh wow, it really worked for me!"

Yeah, I know. I was trying to stay out of this altogether, saving up for the tournament proper. Oh well.

But, yeah, it worked for me.

In part, I'm a sucker for that slow reveal that things aren't quite what they seem (=The Sense of an Ending=). But I thought TBA did a great job of putting you in the aggrieved husband's head and setting up the late reveal without cheating the reader. And of getting us through that reveal without dehumanizing Toby as the price of rehabilitating Rachel, which is no simple matter.

I enjoyed the male outrage at the ordinary indignities women face in the workplace in the Toby role reversal.

I liked the layered and repeated ironies of the story.

I appreciated the faint echoes of =American Pastoral=. Not just in the central difficulty of understanding what's going on inside another person's head, but also in the construction of the story by a narrator who fades in and out of our awareness. I did feel the author seemed hesitant to fully commit to the narrator, and not all of the transitions back to the narrator felt equally smooth; but the narrator's story reflects the books themes, providing another layer of coherence and not just a graceful way to lift us out of Toby's aggressively subjective perspective.

And I appreciated the way TBA revealed how narrative colors our perceptions. (In a way, inverting the =American Pastoral= exercise, where Roth's narrator's project was narrative coherence and not objective understanding.) I was reminded of Toby's construction of his "crazy ex" in Emily Van Duyne's recent article about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath on LitHub:

"Loving Sylvia Plath is partly about the way that Hughes used his power and influence to market a death-obsessed Plath to the reading public, and how, when this worked, he hoisted the blame for this (mis)perception of Plath onto others, including Plath’s friends and family, and women readers as a whole, as Janet Badia has brilliantly shown in her work. He reserved a particular disdain for young women students who he dubbed “cultists” and “unauthorized” biographers.
In the archive, I found much evidence for said marketing in his official correspondence with editors and publishers....",

(The whole thing can be found here)

I thought the message was a surprisingly nuanced look at problems of feminism. I'll borrow from a review, which I think rolls it up better than I could:

Once the women’s lives are fully realized, readers are left with Rachel, a woman who has thrown her life into her job and winds up unhappy; Libby, who quit her job to become a full-time mother in the suburbs and winds up unhappy; Nahid, a woman Toby meets on a dating app who had no kids and never worked and offered her rich husband lots of sex and winds up unhappy; and Karen Cooper, a hospital patient in a coma because no one was able to diagnose her with a disease that could have been very easy to diagnose by looking her in the eye. And on the list goes until you have to ask: What, exactly, was the path these women were supposed to take to make things turn out differently? How does one escape the pitfalls of being a woman?

And yes, the problem with women is men. Because if you follow any female character’s problems back far enough, you’ll eventually hit a man—a cheating spouse, a sexist boss, etc. But the men are not the enemy. Not exactly. Because the book’s women, on the whole, are just as flawed as the men, and Toby, our leading guy, is never really treated as a villain.

The problem is the lie the women have been fed: that sexism is over and the world is fair and that if a woman plays her cards right, she can avoid disappearing. As narrator Libby explains it, “When Rachel and I were little girls, we had been promised by a liberated society that had almost ratified the Equal Rights Amendment that we could do anything we wanted. We were told that we could be successful, that there was something special about us that we could achieve anything.”

(Read the full review here.)

Maybe that message is banal, and I'm just not sophisticated enough to see it. If so, though, the book was a good fit for my degree of ignorance. I was left repeatedly wondering the same thing as the reviewer: "What, exactly, was the path these women were supposed to take to make things turn out differently?" Maybe the answer is obvious to some of you, but not to me. And I was moved by the tension between that deeply tragic message and the comic-ironic tone of the telling.

Finally, while not everyone may have liked the ambiguities of the ending, I thought that the clever setup echoing the narrator was an unexpectedly effective way to avoid providing easy answers for a book that is centered on the realization that there are no easy answers.

Yeah, sometimes I just want an angry anthem, and Fleishman did it for me - that review felt like it pulled thoughts out of my head and put them down on paper. I felt both vindicated and like punching something when I finished the book.

I’m not done with the book, but I know where it’s going and I sort of hate it. There’s something to be said about the way stories tend to be subsumed and re-articualted by those in positions of power, and how we often receive those stories filtered through the prism of people who don’t actually live them, but to say that this is primarily done through the lens of a gender hierarchy is simplistic as hell. Poor people historically have had their stories articulated by the well-off (Dickens, Steinbeck); people of color by white people; isolated people by the well-connected. The dominance of certain perspectives over others is an issue of access, and it’s something that’s changing now that most novels published in the US are written by women.

So while I don’t disagree with the premise of the theme, I don’t think that it’s any deeper in effect than the calls for inclusion we read about all the time. The books just limits it to gender. Which is fine, but reading it as a poor latino there’s a sort of “poor rich white women, when will they FINALLY get their due?” feeling I had throughout that I’m kind of ashamed of. The class theme was there, but I wish it would’ve been explored in a deeper and more interesting way.

Also, anyone who thinks that it’s as easy to get a date as a short man as it’s portrayed in this book hasn’t spoken to many short men. There’s a reason a man is 9% more likely to kill himself for every inch he is below average. So to use Toby’s feelings about that as a signifier for an unjustified sense of self-pity is irresponsible, and show’s a real lack of understanding and empathy on the writer’s part. Which is pretty ironic, given that the theme of the novel is about the distortion inherent to trying to articulate experiences one hasn't actually lived.

This book commented on some ridiculous aspects of our culture and at times, made me laugh out loud. For instance, take Fleishman’s height. It heavily weighs against him until he’s a doctor, then women who are taller than him don’t care. What does that say about our concepts of desirability from the male and female perspectives? And what about our parents refrain to be lawyers and doctors? I love how Fleishman is a doctor but Rachel feels this is beneath him. What a commentary on our society, especially when he lists his salary as in the mid-200K’s if I remember correctly. I died laughing when he fired the nanny for letting his son watch porn. He had no backup plan. He thinks he’s getting back at Rachel but he’s hurting himself. And back to the doctor point, why can’t we be happy with what we achieve? Why is it always more more more?

But then comes Rachel’s point of view. It turns out she’s not so bad. She can’t seem to help herself out of the crazy cycle she’s on.

I enjoyed this book and I’m glad it made the list. I was surprised at how often I was smiling because I could relate to ridiculous cultural norms not just in NYC, but other places. The book help up a giant mirror to our society.

Jon wrote: "So while I don’t disagree with the premise of the theme, I don’t think that it’s any deeper in effect than the calls for inclusion we read about all the time. The books just limits it to gender. "

I'd like to recommend, after you are done, that you give a quick read of the review I linked to above, and see if you still think it is just a call for gender inclusion. I don't think it is. But finish first....

So to use Toby’s feelings about that as a signifier for an unjustified sense of self-pity is irresponsible, and show’s a real lack of understanding and empathy on the writer’s part.

I don't think it was a signifier for an unjustified sense of self-pity, I think it was part of the gender-role inversion. Men don't have quite the same kinds of body issues that women do, but obviously height is one of the few. This is TBA putting the problem in the not-usually-oppressed person's hands.

Just having a little distance from this book, my gripes stand but I also just found it so bleak as I am very much in sympathy with the author's world view and saw almost nothing redemptive in the whole thing. So along with everything else it was just an enormous bummer.

That has me thinking about how a couple of the books in the tournament that I liked more had what I thought were too-easy endings so I'm not sure if I've read anything that felt like it reflected the 'correct' level of redeem ability (correct in terms of what my story brain needs) -- maybe it's only 'Girl Woman Other' that feels right (the people in that book frankly have much much more in the way of real problems but seem to be moving forward in ways that were more resonant to me).

This brings up something else I wondered about Fleishman which is that I wonder if I'd be able to connect to it more if it dealt with what feel like 'regular' people to me -- everyone's status is so elevated but I feel like you'd be able to get much thd same character dynamics in a midsize city with people having jobs that feel more real -- though I suppose you really gave to be in a major city to go through dating apps like he does and not constantly be running into the people.

I guess I give the author credit for getting me to think about how a similar story would look in my town. It seems quite accurate that people at. Such a high level are so excessively status conscious (the idea of a successful doctor being regarded as low status was an interesting observation if mostly confined to a very specific set of people, but also I couldn't quite get over the thought experiment of 'can't they be somewhere else where the status war isn't so extreme, though I suppose that's the contrast of Libby's suburban life?? And of course Rachel's job doesn't really travel but I'm not clear what it was that actually connected her to that field??)

(For what it's worth I thought Toby's awareness of his height was real and observed with the right amount of empathy, do I didn't think it was at all meant to feel like a fake problem.)

Clearly I'm still thinking about this one even if I don't like that I am and reading it may have contributed to a depressive epis.