I finally finished Taffy Akner’s Fleischman is in Trouble after starting it on vacation this summer. Some reviews:

NPR:

The great trick of Fleishman Is in Trouble is that it cons the reader into siding with Toby. Brodesser-Akner demonstrates how women get suckered into acquiescing to misogyny by suckering both narrator and reader — and then showing us what she’s done. When I saw her trick, I was floored.

Wapo:

But, she suggests, when you’re stuck, tightfisted, inside your own story — unable to imagine that how you experience others is really how you experience yourself — the most unknowable person may be you, after all.

Vox:

That’s the Taffy Brodesser-Akner trick, the thing that makes her profiles so clear-eyed and important, the thing that lifts her divorce novel head and shoulders above so many others in its genre: She is always willing to extend her empathy to people we are trained to believe are not worthy of our consideration. She is always willing to treat them as real people.

Fleischman does pull quite a trick: after establishing Toby as a sympathetic character, the narrator starts to sour on him a bit. And then we come to sympathize, quite surprisingly, with the ostensible source of Toby’s distress–his ex-wife, Rachel.