Did We Misunderstand Which Fleishman Was In Trouble? A Reinterpretation of The Novel and Limited Series

 

If you’ve read my blog this past summer, you know that when I was looking at Hulu’s adaptation of Fleishman Is In Trouble the now Emmy nominated limited series that Taffy Brodesser-Akner developed from her best selling novel, I thought there was something fundamentally flawed about the series. I found the first two episodes distasteful, and it was only a combination of the Emmy nominations and the strike in Hollywood that led me to finish it at all. I admitted at the end it was better than it appeared on first glance, but I still felt there was something wrong with the perception of the series.

Because I go out of my way not to read novels before I see their adaptations on TV, I did not read the book until late last year. And it was only fairly recently that I finally put my finger on what is wrong with Brodesser-Akner’s book and by extension the series.

Brodesser-Akner has said that she wanted to tell a story about all the pressures women face and that to do so she decided to make the story fundamentally from a man’s perspective. The first section of the novel bares the title but the third and last section is titled “Rachel Fleishman is In Trouble.” I think the fundamental problem is that by telling both these stories Brodesser-Akner is missing who the real victims are.

What follows is my interpretation as to why I believe both the limited series and by extension Brodesser-Akner’s narrative are flawed as works of fiction. As a result, I will be spoiling much of the book and limited series. I also admit this is just one interpretation, admitting coming from a white, cis male. Make of that what you will.

The novel begins with Rachel dropping the Fleishman children on her ex-husband’s doorstep, promising she will pick them up at the end of the weekend. She does not come back and Toby spends much of the series trying to figure out what has happened to Rachel. At first he is genuinely worried that something horrible has happened to her but when he learns from ‘friends’ of Rachel that they saw her lying on a park bench, saying she was getting some ‘me-time’, he becomes infuriated with her.

Much of the series that follows shows him trying to deal with the fallout. He spends it first trying to figure out how to handle his children and starts by sending them off to ‘camp’. Halfway through the summer, there is an incident at the camp and he has to take them home. He tells them both that their mother seems to have abandoned them, something he has no reason to doubt at the time – and is actually true, despite how Brodesser-Akner wants to gloss over that fact.

Near the end of the series, Libby, who has spent much of the novel hanging out with Toby and Seth (I’ll get back to her in a bit) encounters Rachel sitting on a park bench, completely disoriented. Here in ‘Me Time’ we get Rachel’s side of the story. We see that before her daughter was born, she was molested by her OB-GYN and never truly recovered from it. Her reaction has been to throw herself into her work at the expense of all else, determined to become a good provider and make sure her children want for nothing. Toby and Rachel begin to fight constantly over their differing principles and eventually they separate and divorce. Rachel starts an affair with an older man, who seems to support her drive and command and they go on a weekend retreat where she essentially starts to have a breakdown. The older man leaves her behind and she spends the next several weeks in her apartment in what amounts to a fugue state, completely losing track of time which is where she in when Libby finds her.

Libby goes to see Toby and tell her what is wrong in the final episode. I was appalled as Toby’s reaction as it was brutal and unsympathetic. Now I’ve had some time to think about it and I wonder: was it really?

Hear me out. I don’t deny what happened to Rachel was horrible and that her experience was traumatic. But look at it from Toby’s point of view. He has spent the entire summer dealing with the fallout of the consequences, not just for himself but for his children. He spent much of the series trying to protect them from their mother’s abandonment, which is what it felt like to them. He’s had to deal with the fallout of trying to find a future in which their mother will not be there. He’s finally got to the point of dealing with their trauma – and considering how messy the divorce was for Toby and Rachel, it must have been far worse for them. It doesn’t help that at the start of the series, they clearly prefer their mother even though Toby has been more active in being a parent than Rachel has, something Brodesser-Akner does not refute in either version of the story.

And it’s worth noting that after Rachel realizes how much time she’s lost, her first action is not to go to the children she left with her husband but to see her best client who tells her she’s cut ties with her because she was out of reach. This is taken as another sign she is unlovable which I imagine is painful. She says in the novel she’s upset that Toby will take the kids from her, but its argued in the case of something they should have – not about the children themselves. Even her decision that she doesn’t want to know or hear about the kids until she’s okay can be read either as a desire to make sure she’s safe to be around them – or a continued decision to put her well-being ahead of theirs. There is no evidence at the end of the series that she has changed in that regard.

But I think that is logical because we are seeing the novel through Libby’s eyes – and her actions are a parallel to watch Rachel has done, something she does not seem to realize until the end of the series. I have to say I by far find Libby a problematic character throughout the book and the series and that’s because I can not see any version of events where is not fundamentally selfish and needy. Libby’s malaise is traced to many reasons – her job, her sense of nostalgia, some version of what it means to be a woman.

I think that’s too complicated. She always certain she was happier once. She even admits as much at the end of the series, which is why she’s decided to spend the summer dealing with Toby’s problems. She’s bored with her life and she’s yearning for excitement and she thinks being around Toby will fix it.

This doesn’t change the fact there is not a single action she takes in the novel or series that isn’t selfish. She spends the summer essentially abandoned her husband and her children in New Jersey to spend time in New York with Toby. Adam has no problem with it for most of the series; he’s clearly trying to be supporting. But it’s worth noting Libby’s behavior is not only barely the level of good friend, it’s that of a neglective wife and mother. At one point, she returns from a trip to Disneyland (the park is named in the book) and spends her time bitching about how bad it was to be treated with privilege. To be clear, when you take your kids to Disneyland, it’s about them being happy, not the parents (and if you’re upset that you didn’t have to wait hours in line at any theme park, we have to talk about your priorities as a parent or human being)

At the end of the series Toby reminds Libby that, unlike him, there’s someone waiting at home who loves her. She admits she basically treated Adam like a roommate. Brodesser-Akner tries very hard to argue all of this part of some kind of great feminist crisis of the problem of being a woman in a man’s world. She keeps claiming this is part of some great malaise in society to be so desperately unhappy when you are fundamentally happy. All of this is about the sisterhood, womanhood, the feminine mystique. At no point during this long diatribe does she even mention her children. Even her moves forward to try and find a path are about her needs, her happiness. Her children are incidental, irrelevant. The fact that the last images of the series of Libby are of her with Adam or dancing by herself are critical in that respect; her idea for fulfillment does not seem to involve her children.

 In the final passages of the book, Brodesser-Akner mentions many things about being a woman, the promises that Rachel and she were given and the lessons they learned about it. Motherhood does not enter into either parts of their experience.  That Toby and Adam have both essentially spent the summer parenting while their mothers essentially went on walkabout is not mentioned in the novel. Rachel’s reasons are clearly more due to that pressure, but there’s a part of Libby who clearly seems to admire even that. She seems to like the idea of ‘standing guard’ over Rachel – a woman she doesn’t know that well compared to Toby -  more than spending time with her family. Adam never truly complains in the novel about how he has been neglected, and it’s clear that’s just something that Libby herself takes for granted rather than considers a virtue. Her husband is shown as nothing but supportive throughout the entire series and it seems to annoy Libby more than anything else.

Perhaps that is why I think, when all is said and done, the actual Fleishman who is in trouble are neither Rachel nor Toby but Solly and Hannah, who are dealing with two very troubled parents, neither of whom seems fully equipped to guide them in the future no matter what happens. They’ve already been through a lot as children who have gone through divorce; their mother has been through a mental breakdown and it may be weeks before she goes to see them or if their father even allows them too, and both of their parents are still in the fundamentally unhappy place they were at the start. Most of the series has Toby ill-equipped to deal with his children in the absence of Rachel, and there’s little sign he’s improved at the end that much.

Fleishman is in Trouble is ostensibly the story of how difficult it is to be a woman in a man’s world. Inadvertently Brodesser-Akner also tells a story of how self-involved so many of these women and men are at the expense of the next generation. Libby says at the start of the series that the story she’s telling ‘isn’t about me’ when it really is. There’s also an irony late in the novel when Libby says children are wearing T-Shirts that say ‘THE FUTURE IS FEMALE’ than Libby doesn’t get. The novel and the series are both clear on one thing: Libby only cares about the past and the present. The future doesn’t matter to her. That’s the real reason the Fleishman children are in trouble when the series begins – and just as likely when it ends.