Trouble

Product Information

Truth was seeping through the seams.... while exploring marriage, divorce, friendships, dating, sexing, colleagues, children, siblings, money, narcissism, assholes, annoyances, anger, selfishness, entitlement, play dates, yoga clothes, beef lo mein, women of a certain age, ramblings, points of view from several characters, communication challenges, all in the context of being a touchy & controversial novel. Just One More”– In this book, a little bear begs his mother for just one more bedtime story before he falls asleep. A major subplot – the third pathway I mentioned above – comes from our first-person narrator, Libby, who is a college-friend of Toby’s. She has her own hill to climb, meaning that she lives in the inner circle of hell (the suburbs), and is curiously frustrated by contentment. It was the stories they told, and the way they told them, that first got me interested in writing about those times. My father and his brothers were semi-literate, but they had such faith in language. Tellings of their times in Ireland were entirely questionable, and inevitably self-mythologising, yet there was something true in the way they owned their stories, relayed them in their own language – a polyglot of jokes, songs, random diversions, verbal sleight of hand, straight-up misinformation and pure folk poetry – that made me think of the art of storytelling as performative.

What Does the Wind Say?”– In this book, a little girl wonders what the wind is saying as it blows through the trees and across the fields. Wow this book, such an entertaining foray into the messy lives of rich white people living in New York City! For most of this novel we follow Toby Fleishman, a divorced doctor with two kids whose ex-wife Rachel has disappeared, leaving him with childcare responsibilities beyond his capacity. As the story progresses, we learn more about Toby’s grievances against his wife, witness his inability flourish in his post-marriage state, and recognize that maybe Toby’s narrative about Rachel isn’t all that it seems. Brodesser-Akner has Rachel silently dropping the two children off at their father’s apartment and then disappearing for several weeks. Toby is infuriated that he can’t get ahold of Rachel. They have joint custody and he has enjoyed his time without the children to pursue his new-found sexual freedom [the classic mid-life crisis cliché]. He has to take personal days to take care of them—which negatively impacts his professional life. [Sound familiar working women?]

A book should convey your suffering; a book should speak to what is roiling within you. I thought maybe I could do this through a good young-adult novel, but YA novels were all fantastical things these days, with werewolves and sea creatures and half-bloods and hybrids. My story was small and dumb. Nothing even really happened it it. (14%) As the story opens, life sounds like an erotic carnival for Toby Fleishman. A New York doctor newly separated from his wife, Toby has arrived at the age of 41 to discover a city suddenly flush with women who want him. Now. “His phone was aglow from sunup to sundown,” the narrator writes, with texts that contained “underboob and sideboob and just straight up boob and all the parts of a woman he never dared dream he would encounter.” After enduring a chronically nerdy adolescence and a tense 14-year marriage, Toby is dazzled by this sexual bounty. “Could it be,” he wonders, “that he wasn’t as. . . . Trouble is an extremely fun, wonderfully British and compassionate novel with a serious side. I started to read Trouble shortly before attending the Walker Blogger Night, just to see what it was like, and before I knew it, I was dropping my current book and taking it to work with me. If you enjoy young adul But then, just as he is about to fully engage with this carnal buffet, Toby’s ex-wife Rachel drops off his kids early one morning and disappears. A normal human operating with a semblance of concern would be worried about this turn of events. Not Toby. He is instantly, almost frighteningly mad, upset that he has been left as a single parent while there are sentient beings willing to consent to intimate relations only a couple of bus stops away. Fleishman is in Trouble is a incisive, sharply observed and humorous novel that examines the nature and anatomy of a American marriage, family, divorce and identity at the privileged end of the social and economic spectrum, set in New York. The Jewish middle aged hepatologist, Toby Fleishman, and his wife, Rachel, are getting divorced, retaining joint custody of their children, 11 year old Hannah and 7 year old Solly. Whilst this is an entertaining read, there are aspects that grate and irritate, it is overly repeating and in some of the portrayed sex life of Toby. A surprised Toby now discovers he is a much desired man, wanted by many women, which is in sharp contrast to his younger days when disappointment and rejection were more his lot. Nowadays, the modern world of online dating and apps have him plunging in enthusiastically, keen to expand his sexual experiences.

that much as 40-somethings may daydream, they cannot time travel to recapture youth's beauty or the thrill of newness in each sexual encounter;But Toby's new life--liver specialist by day, kids every other weekend, rabid somewhat anonymous sex at night--is interrupted when his ex-wife suddenly disappears. Either on a vision quest or a nervous breakdown, Toby doesn't know--she won't answer his texts or calls. divorce is about forgetfulness – a decision to stop remembering the moment before all chaos – the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments” And -- if we hadn't previously gotten the drift -- it becomes abundantly clear that Chay and Louisa (Henry and Franklin's sister) have been spending time together and are in love. One might well conclude that knowledge of this relationship has contributed to Franklin's neanderthal behavior. But ultimately, I had a lot of sympathy for the mother in this book. She is a highly intelligent woman who on the surface appears to have it all. A very wise octogenarian once told me, "You can have it all, but not at the same time." I've often reflected on this comment. The mother in this book is trying to do just that: for her it's having a big job and being the boss, lots of yoga, being involved with her children lives and activities, and vast social commitments. Personally, I've found it impossible to do many things well at the same time. Something is always breaking down. Another wise octogenarian I know (I love to talk to people in their 80s), once told me, "It's no problem to have a big job and an involved relationship with your children, but then you must have no social life." I have also pondered that comment over the years.