Fleishman Is in Trouble

A witty, punchy and mostly enjoyable debut novel, although not without its flaws. The eponymous Fleishman appears constantly on the verge of a midlife crisis, liberated from his marriage, attracted to and repelled by the online dating scene, and still responsible in many ways for his wife and their kids. The novel is very good on the pressures to conform, fit-in or even just ‘be’ in the aspirational culture of New York where the novel is set. I thought Fleishman captured the frenetic vibe of the city better than many other recent comparable novels. There is, unsurprisingly, also the Jewish angle: over-bearing mothers, guilt and indeed the above pressures again in spades. I found the author's use of italics to emphasise certain points quite irritating and the work was probably (at close on 400 pages) too long too. Then there is the shift in narrative voice: a friend of Fleishman, it is revealed, is the narrator; but she gets her own voice too in the final part of the work (like Molly Bloom in Ulysses). Brodesser-Akner's point seems to be that not just men but women (Fleishman's wife and his narrator-friend, Libby) have mid-life problems too. We're all struggling; we need to slow down and discover ourselves. 8/10.

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner