When I started reading Fleishman Is In Trouble for my book club, it struck me as problematic immediately. At first, I was bothered by the opening scene, where a rich cishet White man objectifies women on a dating app. Soon, however, it began to bother me in an entirely different way. The entire premise of the book upsets me, and I'm not sure if that's because it reveals an uncomfortable truth (I lean away from this one) or distorts an uncomfortable truth (I lean toward this). The narrator of the novel, Toby Fleishman's female friend Elizabeth, explicitly posits that readers are more interested in men, who appear to live meaningfully, while women and minorities' lives are circumscribed by their oppression. She suggests that one would have to "Trojan horse" writing about a woman by writing about it as the life of a man. Enter Toby Fleishman. A sensitive, caring father significantly out-earned by his ambitious, hardworking wife Rachel, Toby's own divorce...
Life, Books, and SFF