Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel

AGAIN I’LL SAY IT: Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exception to that rule is the friends you make in college.

“But this isn’t about our marriage, Toby. This is about me. They didn’t promote me, because I didn’t tell them I was pregnant.” “That’s bullshit. They didn’t make you partner, because you didn’t sleep with Matt Klein and because they don’t fundamentally respect you.” Her response came like a boomerang. “Fuck you, Toby.”

I would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy.

By the time we make this decision, to hook ourselves to a person for the rest of our lives, we’re what? Twenty-five? Thirty? We’re babies. We don’t even know what we’re dealing with. How could we fathom what it would be like to be on our best behavior for that long? Or know what is funny or charming to us now but intolerable in the future? How will

understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying? That the dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it? Or maybe that wasn’t life. Maybe that was just middle age.

She had outgrown him. She was ready to level up. She didn’t want to renovate Seventy-second Street. She wanted to move on up. She wanted Seventy-fifth Street. She wanted the Golden.

I once asked him if the worst part of his job was telling people that their loved ones were dead. Yes, that was bad, of course, he told me. But it was nowhere near as awful as telling them that they or their family were sick. Dead was a diagnosis, and it was definitive. People knew about it. Its reputation preceded it. But illness—illness was a vas

I would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy.

You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement. You’re hating your creation. You’re hating yourself.