37 pages • 1 hour read
Taffy Brodesser-AknerFleishman Is in Trouble
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Gender Roles and Expectations
Fleishman Is in Trouble reverses normative gender roles within the family. In many novels, films, and stories, the father works long hours, is professionally ambitious, and as a result, becomes distant from his children. In Fleishman Is in Trouble, Rachel, the mother, is the ambitious one, and she becomes distanced from her children’s emotional lives. Toby, the father, takes on more child-rearing duties and is more present for his children. Though he is a doctor, he arranges his work hours so that he can be home by dinner time.
Although the husband’s ambition drives a wedge into marriage in most stories, in Fleishman, the wife’s ambition becomes a sore point in the Fleishmans’ relationship. In Part 1, Toby rails against Rachel for prioritizing her social calendar and professional life over her role as a mother:
She’d miraculously become available when the Rothbergs or the Leffers or the Hertzes invited them over for a Friday night dinner. But otherwise, she’d call and say that she “needed” to stay at work because she “needed” to get things done, knowing […] that it was actually her resistance to spending time with her children and to some notion of a traditional role as a mother that made her want to work that much (56).
Rachel spends time away from her family because she wants to, not because she necessarily needs to. Although this is especially painful for Toby, it also makes Rachel a strong character and an independent person. Rather than living her life according to prescribed norms, Rachel lives according to her own wants and needs as a complicated, autonomous, and realized individual. Just as Toby resists her entreaties to be more ambitious because they go against his wishes for himself, Rachel reaches for more because ambition is authentic to her, and for that, she is often vilified.
Male Privilege
Though the novel reverses the traditional, familiar gender roles of husband and wife within the Fleishman family—and in this way acts as a counterpoint to many widespread cultural beliefs about such roles—the novel nevertheless still centers on the actions, thoughts, and feelings of a man for most of its first two parts. The story at first still conforms to cultural expectations about the centrality of male experience and male privilege. As the novel continues, the female narrator becomes more present in the story and begins to share her own experiences and reflections more frequently.
By Part 3, the narrator has left Toby’s perspective and focuses on Rachel’s. Although the story’s perspective shifts from male to the female, no such change has occurred in society. In fact, the narrator suggests, the opposite is true: “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” (236). Though the majority of the story has been filtered through Toby’s point of view, perhaps the story is less about Toby than about the narrator or Rachel; the narrator has only employed Toby so that the reader will “give a shit” about the women in the narrative.
Fantasy Versus Reality
Though Karen Cooper has been unconscious while under his care, Toby realizes he has drawn several conclusions about her that are simply wrong. When Karen Cooper’s friend, Amy, shows Toby pictures of Karen during their weekend in Las Vegas, Toby realizes that Karen is very different from the person he visualized. Based off of the way David Cooper treats Karen, Toby later draws conclusions regarding the health of their marriage that are also disproved. He at first envies the apparent normalcy of their marriage—especially when he compares that normalcy to the state of his own marriage—but then he learns from Amy that Karen had been unhappy in their relationship and had been planning to leave.
This theme carries over into Toby’s dating life, which is mediated through a dating app on his phone. Toby consumes photos of women before meeting them in real life, often noting a discrepancy between the photos and the actual person. Toby makes the connection between his experience with Karen Cooper and his experience with the women he dates when he reflects,
Having an unconscious patient was like talking to someone on the phone for hours before ever seeing them: It was hard to reconcile they hadn’t been what you pictured, and your brain, having never seen the person, corrected for them to be more of what you wished they were” (208).
