It is difficult to know how to review this book, because while it reads easily enough, it doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Perhaps it is more a case of travelling backwards in memories in order to figure out how life has become as messed up as it is, in the present day.
The protagonist is Toby Fleishman, a hepatologist earing $285,000 a year, whose wife, Rachel, an agent representing celebrities with her own company, earns apparently 20 times what he does. They have 2 children, Hannah and Solly, 14 and 9 years of age, one a typical entitled, demanding teenager, and the other still a sweet, curious, unself-conscious kid. When the novel begins, Rachel has surreptitiously dumped the kids in Toby’s house without prior notice, and then proceeds to vanish for the next few weeks. It is not a whodunnit though; Rachel is spotted occasionally, very much alive and well. She is, however, just not responding to any of Toby’s messages and not contactable.
He’d given her a key to his new apartment not to pull shit like this, but so they could have something that was amicable. Amicable amicable amicable. Did you ever notice that you only used the word amicable in relation to divorce. Was it because it was so often used for divorce that you didn’t want to poison anything else with it? The way you could say ‘malignant’ for things other than cancer but you never did?” (p7-8)
This is typical of the style of writing in this novel. It likes to pose rhetorical questions, it tries to go in circles apparently figuring out significances of divorce, marriage, happiness, and other such weighty topics or concepts.
Toby has two close friends who were his college mates, who had drifted apart, but now have reunited: Seth, the handsome party animal who makes a lot of money, and Libby who thought she had some writing talent but has settled down into a suburban life with her 3 children and passive, loving husband, Adam. We hardly see anything of her three children and Adam, who are merely props in the novel. Likewise, Seth too is just there as a point of extreme against which we can measure others, a strawman rather than a real person.
So for most part, we are left with Toby and his angsts. Toby, about to be divorced, has discovered a new set of freedoms, online dating. Or at least, online sexting and sex. It is a mystery how Toby finds time to be a full time single parent, hepatologist, and also engage in multiple dates or affairs. For most of the novel, we hear from Toby’s point of view, so Rachel is represented as totally unfair and irrational and a horror to live with. In the 3rd and last section, we hear from Rachel, perhaps it is an attempt to be even handed, to show her point of view, but we have already had 292 pages of Toby’s side of the story, the next 50 odd pages of Rachel’s account was never going to be particularly convincing unless it was written differently, explosively, radically, and above all, differently! However, it is actually just more of the same. In fact, all the characters and their angst, whether it is Toby, Rachel, Libby, or anyone else, all sound exactly the same. There is no distinctiveness in voices, just endless self-doubt, self-hatred, obsessing, and angst.
That said, surprisingly, it doesn’t read badly at all. It is not sad or heavy or depressing. It is not profound either, or sympathetic, or touching. It is just something that burbles on, entertaining at a low level, at an undemanding level, and in that way, it is quite an achievement in itself, to continue to hold one’s attention quite easily for nearly 400 pages, while going nowhere and not being particularly good or having any insights to share. There’s plenty of the usual rehashed angles about stay at home moms and working moms and not giving enough time to the children and whether career should be about providing well for the family or doing the thing you love and helping people, etc etc etc. Nothing new here. Also, the usual round and round the bush about how difficult it is for women to function in a man’s world, and all too much about how everyone is apparently humping everyone else madly, round the clock, everywhere, if the novel is to be believed.
Overall, it is a depiction of rather privileged people living mostly in New York with their first world problems, trying to figure their lives out, trying to be happy, comparing themselves with others around them, worrying about what others think of them, trying to remain desirable, trying to find love, trying to find themselves. The odd thing is how the novel manages not to be annoying; perhaps that is testimony to its writing ability, despite the sameness of characters, despite the one-dimensional perspectives, despite its predictability, it still is piece of relatively entertaining chick-lit.
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