FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Great novels warned you: Marriage is a mess.

Madame Bovary despised her stifling union. The dreary husband in “Middlemarch” nearly ruined Dorothea Brooke. And as soon as Anna Karenina tumbled into the wrong bed, she fell from society, and leapt onto train tracks. In 20th-century fiction, wedding bells tolled as forbiddingly, with a plethora of disgruntled husbands yearning to ditch capitalist conformity and hit the road. But wedlock was a lock. Which demoted many a protagonist’s wife to the role of shackle.

In her witty and well-observed debut, “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner updates the miserable-matrimony novel, dropping it squarely in our times, where a husband complains that his wife sees him as “a blinking cursor awaiting her instructions,” and extramarital affairs involve emojis. The most significant adjustment, however, is to focus on the left-behind spouse, and to make it the husband.

Toby Fleishman, 41, is a doctor at a major New York hospital, which counts as a pitifully low-income job to his wife’s friends. In this milieu, a house in the Hamptons is mandatory, kids are with the nanny or at Mandarin lessons and parents do spot-checks on the appalling things their little ones just posted on Instagram.

After 14 years of marriage, Toby is splitting from Rachel, a successful talent agent whom he finds unloving. He nurtures their kids while she gets the soaring career, flouncing through their home “like a special guest star,” as Toby complains to a divorce lawyer, noting that Rachel is also the big earner. Yes, the lawyer tells Toby, “You’re the wife.”