I am obsessed with the writing of the American journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who goes deep on topics like Gwyneth Paltrow’s perplexing Goop empire, Marie Kondo’s devoted acolytes, reclusive celebrities and taking her Orthodox Jewish mother to HempCon. So I was beyond excited to read her first work of fiction, Fleishman Is in Trouble (Penguin Random House). The novel is a sprawling, raucous satire set in contemporary Manhattan, composed with Brodesser-Akner’s recognizable style of long breathless paragraphs, piles and piles of details, plenty of personal insight and somewhat scattered detours (the author admits she has never stuck to an assigned word count). Though the hero is the baffled, newly divorced doctor Toby Fleishman, who is on the trail of his incommunicado ex-wife, the story is told by a friend from his youth, Elizabeth (Libby), who shares many characteristics with Brodesser-Akner herself. Libby could not have observed or been told the intricacies of the plot or psychology of the other characters, so this literary device seems a little clunky. That is not to disparage the novel itself, which is ambitious, contemplative and very funny. Rich, successful Manhattanites who complain because someone else is richer and more successful than them are fairly easy to skewer, but the novel is genuinely willing to try to understand all of the humanity it encounters.