I grew to dislike this novel the further I got. First, a few pros:

1. The author did a great job of portraying adult, marital emotions through good metaphors. I found myself reading and being like "ooh. That was a good one." often.

2. i enjoyed reading about mid life crises, and the content matter was interesting.

My reasons for disliking this book:
1. Objectification of women/sooo much male gaze: Look, the main character Toby goes through a divorce through a "nasty" woman whose ambition - professional and social mobility--makes it very hard for them to communicate throughout their marriage. We are supposed to sympathize with Toby because in their marriage, he played the traditional part of the female caretaker - he sacrifices his career a lil (still makes $250k as a doctor) to take care of kids and prop up Rachel's career.

Sympathies aside...I don't think I read a single description of a female character that wasn't accompanied by some comment about their skin (botox or sagging), their shirt (always some "Yoga is my wine and my amazon prime" typography), their dyed hair, their attempts to seduce him. IS THIS SATIRE? Unclear. The female characters similarly objectify all the women. Um. This made both the backdrop characters and the main characters incredibly one dimensional and I felt icky the entire time reading this. That's not even touching on Toby's obsession with his dating app where women are suddenly finding him attractive (convenient plot device lol) and sending him pictures of their genitals. I just assumed that was some sort of plot device to emphasize his utter chaotic mid life crisis and let it go, but since the actual real life community members, friends, coworkers in his life were also constantly sexualized, it appeared to be a flaw on the author's part...

2. The experiences were so so limited to wealthy Jewish new yorkers that any conclusions or themes I could walk away with felt completely customized to this social/income group. Is this supposed to be a cross section of marriage in America? If so, it failed. I now have insight into how people who could easily pay to buy a house in the Hamptons have their mid-life-crises...and I could not care less. Not a single character was sympathizable. Even Rachel, whose background is supposed to contrast with her wealthy peers, comes from a sturdy safety net, where the hardest financial part of her upbringing was not being able to buy clothes for tennis. That's about as contrasting as it gets.

Either the author has incredibly limited life experiences that has prevented her from mentioning a single non-wealthy, Jewish character (oh sorry, Mona the help! can't forget her Nicaraguan self!) or she is trying to emphatically paint a picture of what's wrong with this social group. Either way, Libby's narrative monologue that was supposed to be in touch with the plight of middle aged women caught up in marriages and nuclear families...was unfortunately out of touch.

BORING.

3. Author's attempt to show Rachel's perspective in the last 50 pages was rushed. Hard to understand Rachel without larger investment. Her narrative didn't match up with Toby's in a revelatory way (for example, revelatory would be "oh, so when Toby's memory showed him saying X and Rachel saying Y, he was actually leaving out an important component and revealing himself to be a biased narrator." Didn't happen.)

4. Lol the Libby character's narration was really out of place. I get that we're supposed to believe she wrote a book about this whole thing and it's meta meta meta unfortunately...she was just sort of annoying...