It's tempting to be a bit snobby about this book, to dismiss it for its readability and (on the surface) familiar themes and perspectival shifts for contemporary literary fiction (re: the perspectival shifts, an obvious reference point is Fates and Furies; another, that came out in the same year as Fleishman, is Trust Exercise). And I do think there's something to that response, which I felt in myself the whole time I was reading it.
At the same time though, there is real penetration and insight in it - especially in the way that Libby emerges as the most interesting character as Toby recedes a little and Rachel has also come to the forefront. Fleishman has something real to say about marriage, women's experience and modern society, as well as about identity and individual and social psychology and the gaps in people's understanding of each other, and much of it lands properly in the novel's later stages, with the 'reveal' of Rachel's side of events and, in parallel, with the shift in understanding on Libby's part and shading in of her life. The twists are twists and shifts in perspective, not in plot exactly, and they're pretty strongly signalled - which is a good thing in this case.
Just how well it works depends - and how much credit to give the book - depends on how seriously one takes the metafictional gesture near the end when Libby is revealed as not only the narrator, which we've known all along, but also the possible 'author' of the very book we've been reading ... which in turn brings into play all the unreliabilities that we might expect from her character, telling the story of these characters, based on the evidence of the text itself. The more seriously we take that, the better the book becomes - and it's impossible to know (aptly?) how seriously that should be.
