This book is a "Parnassus told me to" pick for this month. Parnassus Books is our local independent bookstore, and one of Nashville's "must-dos" for visitors. They have a professional staff of booksellers that are ready and willing to give you a book recommendation. I've asked twice for a recommendation, and both times this book is the first one mentioned.
I love a novel that can make divorce funny: all the train-wrecks, fights, and personal implosions that come with unwinding an entire life don't feel funny when they are happening, but man, when you can pick up a book and see a character going through what you're going through (or have been through), and doing it a spectacularly awful way, well, that's what really lifts the spirit.
You know I'm right.
So, what's great about this novel is that this time, it's not the wife who gets stuck behind with the fall-out. Oh no, this time Rachel, married to Toby Fleishman, decides Toby isn't the only one getting his groove back, so she unceremoniously drops the kids off with him one weekend. Then she disappears.
She was the ambitious one, the upwardly mobile one. Fleishman was just Fleishman. So, it's easy for him to think that it's all Rachel's fault. All of it. The unrest, the divorce, the discord. All of it.
But maybe it wasn't. It hardly ever is. So as Fleishman has to unspin his "tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife," he starts to see that maybe he had it wrong all along.
Fleishman Is In Trouble is getting all the raves from reviewers and independent bookstores, so I'm giving it a thumbs up.
