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Apr. 25th, 2023 01:26 pmFleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
I tried a few times to read in ebook but didn't get very far; I finished the print version over one Shabbos. This one's kinda personal. First, Brodesser-Akner is doing a very conscious Philip Roth deconstruction, with her narrator doing a sort of female Nathan Zuckerman thing. and I'm always there for insightful takes on Roth. But moreover Akner is a little less than ten years older than me and was raised Orthodox, and as best I can tell graduated from NYU just as the whole Bronfman scene was becoming a thing, and so this is a book that is about the lives of the people I was sort of catching glimpses of heading out into the world as I was just starting out in school. I found the Jewish cultural material really fascinating.
I wonder if this is a book that reads very differently for men than women. There's a structural thing where Fleishman is in Trouble is, for most of the book, about the trouble that Toby Fleishman is dealing with as a newly separated single father whose spouse has failed to pick up her children at the time arranged in their custody agreement. But in the final fifty pages, a section titled Rachel Fleishman is in Trouble, we get Rachel's side of the story. And... it doesn't really, to me, make her come off more sympathetically? And I wasn't sure if it was supposed to? But that structurally doesn't quite make sense to me, why add a 50 page coda that basically verifies the husband's point of view? So I wonder if maybe if you're coming at it from the other side of the patriarchy Rachel's betrayals make sense?
Or maybe it's more like the 'Amy is weirdly likeable' reviews I wrote about in my review of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, where the energy of having valid complaints about the patriarchy but being a sociopath kind of floods the zone with satisfying ambiguity? Amy is not good, but Nick is a shitbag who kind of deserves what happens to him. And similarly maybe the point is not that what Rachel Fleishman did is justifiable, but simply that Toby Fleishman is a selfish asshole. And both the non-justifiability of Rachel's actions, and Toby being a selfish asshole can be true simultaneously.
In any case, Brodesser-Akner is a good writer and there are some really powerful passages in the book, but the reason I've read so much Philip Roth in spite of him certainly being a selfish asshole is that very few writers can construct a sentence as beautiful as Roth, and Brodesser-Akner is not at that level. But I enjoyed this book a lot.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
I gobbled this up in two days. And I didn't expect to, especially after some of the early writing on chemistry in the book seemed like vapid technobabble, but it ended up being an incredibly compelling combination of fun, quirky, complicated characters, thoughtful meditation of the place of women in science and in society, and just a dynamic, effectively moving story.
It's about a female research chemist in 1950s California who after suffering a string of failures at the hand of the patriarchy ends up hosting a cooking show on TV (Cooking is simply chemistry, after all) while teaching her predominantly housewife audience about chemistry and female empowerment, and also building a quirky non-traditional family including her prodigy preteen daughter, her post-menopausal strictly Catholic housewife neighbor, a Protestant minister who doesn't believe in God, a dog that knows almost a thousand words, and her gynecologist/rowing coach. I found it really emotionally effective and I'm so glad I read it. Though honestly I'm not sure why I read it, it's been really buzzy but it also doesn't quite seem like the kind of book I tend to read? A good reminder to read outside your comfort zone.
I tried a few times to read in ebook but didn't get very far; I finished the print version over one Shabbos. This one's kinda personal. First, Brodesser-Akner is doing a very conscious Philip Roth deconstruction, with her narrator doing a sort of female Nathan Zuckerman thing. and I'm always there for insightful takes on Roth. But moreover Akner is a little less than ten years older than me and was raised Orthodox, and as best I can tell graduated from NYU just as the whole Bronfman scene was becoming a thing, and so this is a book that is about the lives of the people I was sort of catching glimpses of heading out into the world as I was just starting out in school. I found the Jewish cultural material really fascinating.
I wonder if this is a book that reads very differently for men than women. There's a structural thing where Fleishman is in Trouble is, for most of the book, about the trouble that Toby Fleishman is dealing with as a newly separated single father whose spouse has failed to pick up her children at the time arranged in their custody agreement. But in the final fifty pages, a section titled Rachel Fleishman is in Trouble, we get Rachel's side of the story. And... it doesn't really, to me, make her come off more sympathetically? And I wasn't sure if it was supposed to? But that structurally doesn't quite make sense to me, why add a 50 page coda that basically verifies the husband's point of view? So I wonder if maybe if you're coming at it from the other side of the patriarchy Rachel's betrayals make sense?
Or maybe it's more like the 'Amy is weirdly likeable' reviews I wrote about in my review of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, where the energy of having valid complaints about the patriarchy but being a sociopath kind of floods the zone with satisfying ambiguity? Amy is not good, but Nick is a shitbag who kind of deserves what happens to him. And similarly maybe the point is not that what Rachel Fleishman did is justifiable, but simply that Toby Fleishman is a selfish asshole. And both the non-justifiability of Rachel's actions, and Toby being a selfish asshole can be true simultaneously.
In any case, Brodesser-Akner is a good writer and there are some really powerful passages in the book, but the reason I've read so much Philip Roth in spite of him certainly being a selfish asshole is that very few writers can construct a sentence as beautiful as Roth, and Brodesser-Akner is not at that level. But I enjoyed this book a lot.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
I gobbled this up in two days. And I didn't expect to, especially after some of the early writing on chemistry in the book seemed like vapid technobabble, but it ended up being an incredibly compelling combination of fun, quirky, complicated characters, thoughtful meditation of the place of women in science and in society, and just a dynamic, effectively moving story.
It's about a female research chemist in 1950s California who after suffering a string of failures at the hand of the patriarchy ends up hosting a cooking show on TV (Cooking is simply chemistry, after all) while teaching her predominantly housewife audience about chemistry and female empowerment, and also building a quirky non-traditional family including her prodigy preteen daughter, her post-menopausal strictly Catholic housewife neighbor, a Protestant minister who doesn't believe in God, a dog that knows almost a thousand words, and her gynecologist/rowing coach. I found it really emotionally effective and I'm so glad I read it. Though honestly I'm not sure why I read it, it's been really buzzy but it also doesn't quite seem like the kind of book I tend to read? A good reminder to read outside your comfort zone.