Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree†is an 18-minute opus released in 1967. It begins as a droll and drily delivered story about Arlo getting in trouble with the law by inadvertently littering, having deposited a half-ton of garbage at the bottom of a cliff because the dump was closed the day before Thanksgiving. It’s a rhetorical stiletto disguised as a fun little standup bit scored to just the type of earwormy folk tune you’d expect Woody Guthrie’s son to compose. About seven and a half minutes into the song, Arlo flips the whole folksy-wolksy sardonic tale on its head, saying, “But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came to talk about the draft.†That’s “Vantablack.â€
As I was taking notes for this recap, it occurred to me that the plot points of “Vantablack†don’t show us the point of the episode. Toby and Seth’s big night out, Libby’s near miss of her family vacation, the acquisition of Bubbles the dachshund (a literal dream come true for Hannah, who desperately needs a win), Toby having to pick the kids up from camp early because of Hannah’s unfortunate and unintentional sexting situation, Toby finally telling the kids that Rachel hasn’t been on a business trip all this time, the three remaining Fleishmans’ experience of attempting to immerse themselves in the disturbing Vantablack exhibit at the Natural History Museum — all of it is important and none of it is the point.
The point of “Vantablack†is the dawning realization that this whole story is Libby’s deft execution of a narrative Trojan horse. She’s been making us think that Toby Fleishman is the main character. It stands to reason: He’s the titular character, and we see a disarmingly warts-and-all portrayal of his mishegoss. All along, though, who’s been telling and shaping Toby’s story? Through whose point of view have we really been seeing the story unfold? Why such a distinctive, knowing voice-over? Why not the relative invisibility of close third-person narration instead?
I submit for further testing a hypothesis: The true subject of Fleishman Is in Trouble is Libby Epstein. It’s about her life, her midlife malaise, her compulsion to tell stories, her having not written a word in the last two years, and maybe most significantly, it’s about how she — a glossy men’s magazine writer so underestimated by her colleagues that she quit her lifelong dream job — takes her former hero Archer Sylvan’s own defiantly unexamined notions about truth and accuracy being the sole storytelling province of men and shanks him with them.
I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s back up a little. “Vantablack†reveals this story’s structural and thematic inspiration by taking us on a lengthy digression into Libby’s own story. Libby’s professional history as a magazine writer and (eventually) disillusioned acolyte of the wild-man writer Archer Sylvan is the wellspring of everything ambitious and troublesome in her life. Toby remarked in episode four that Sylvan’s 1979 divorce-focused book Uncoupling had not aged well, and Libby agrees. However, she also says that even when the cultural tide had turned against his unrepentant misogyny, she’d “forgive anything as exciting and angry and urgent as†Sylvan’s work. Fair enough, the things that move us move us; we all have our problematic faves, etc.
Over her 15 years at the glossy men’s magazine (explicitly not GQ, so perhaps we should think of it as winkingly not Esquire?), Libby drew the unpleasant but unavoidable conclusion that regardless of her potential to write searing, Zeitgeist-moving stories like Sylvan’s, she’ll never be assigned to work on them. She’s been trying so hard to run with the big dogs that she hasn’t realized, as she wails to Adam, she’s never even been in the game: “No one will read my stories unless they’re about a man!†Why should she bother?
Libby hasn’t so much as opened a new document to noodle around in for the last two years, but she’s still a compulsive and gifted storyteller. Telling us Toby’s story in a Sylvanian style, with herself, Seth, and, to a certain extent, Rachel popping up as interesting side characters, is scratching a long-ignored existential itch. It’s also giving Libby a way to stick it to the assumption that the only real stories, the only ones that are rich with messy truth, and therefore are the only ones worth reading, are about men. Okay, fine. Libby tells a delicious, affecting, and lightly sordid story about a man going through a divorce in a cultural moment just as weird and disorienting as 1979 was! Enjoy! Once hooked, you might not think anything of it when the tale’s teller replaces details of her family’s vacation to [redacted] (they’d rather not be mentioned by name) with the tale of how she got to a point in her life where she’s doing what she must to tell the story spilling out of her. If it takes smuggling her own restless, vexed story into this story about a man, so be it. But her digression into her own trajectory toward malaise in her 40s isn’t really a digression at all — it’s her very own new and improved Uncoupling.
Revisiting earlier episodes, it’s plain that the glimmers of Rachel’s point of view that we’ve seen so far undermine the idea of Toby’s story as a Sylvanian one very early on. Sure, it’s a bawdy, no-holds-barred tale of Toby’s divorce, but unlike Sylvan, Libby does wonder about the wife in her divorce story and allows Rachel’s (according to Sylvan, boring and possibly untrue) perspective to sneak in here and there. By claiming about a third of this episode to tell her own story, Libby is actually improving on Sylvan’s once-groundbreaking but now-outdated style. By fortifying the tale of Fleishman’s troubles with questions and details about Rachel and herself, Libby has made his story richer, messier, and more truthful than anything Sylvan could engage with. For all his gonzo, go-anywhere, do-anything image, Archer Sylvan could never write a story like this because it hurts. It hurts too much to look at all the ways humans break their own hearts and are careless with others’.
The mysteries of the human heart and our specieswide mistreatment of it are nothing when compared with the dread induced by considering this episode’s other major theme: the void. Excuse me, the Void. It deserves the title. The Void has many faces. First, it’s Vantablack, a man-made substance in a shade of black so dark that its use is restricted to the military. To be immersed in it is terrifying, and accordingly, Toby speed-walks away from the room hosting it at the Museum of Natural History. Unbeknownst to him, Toby’s own Void has been guiding his choices for months. It’s an unnerving hole that needs to be filled, and this is the laziest, most obvious connection to make, which is exactly why I’m doing so: How long do you think it takes Toby to turn to his app-driven sex life as a solution to his awareness of the Void? Sure, he throws other things into his Void to see what’ll stick (to walls that don’t exist), but meaningless, never-to-be-repeated sex has lost some of its luster as a go-to emotional-regulation strategy and/or fun hobby.
It’s not particularly shocking that Toby sprinted from monogamy with Rachel to making the rounds of all of Manhattan’s age-appropriate women. A shitty marriage is so lonely, a specific, shameful type of Void. Separating from Rachel forced Toby to stare into the chasm of his loneliness, and who would do that if there were another option on the table? He’s been dodging a massive emotional reckoning with his particular Void, but he can’t hide from it forever. Reckonings are implacable. They demand to be faced.
After racing out of the museum to escape the horror of confronting the presence of his Void and at loose ends, Toby embarks on an all-night, city-wide bacchanal with Seth and his crew of young finance bros with a dawn visit to Nahid as the chaser. Then Nahid goes and messes everything up by repeating the basics of what his lawyer has said — that it won’t really be over until he’s processed his loneliness and grief.
Even Seth has a Void of his own to contend with: the hours upon hours to fill now that he’s out of a job and the looming specter of having to come clean to Vanessa. Seth has been incrementally showing himself to be more self-reflective and insightful in each episode. I like where this is going.
As for Libby, she both feels a Void of her own and is a Void in her own family. That vacation to [redacted] wasn’t at all what it should have been: “While we were on the rides and standing in lines and taking pictures, I wasn’t really with my family. I wasn’t in Florida. I wasn’t on an airplane. I wasn’t at a themed restaurant begging a hostess for a reservation everyone in the world knew to make weeks before but not me. I wasn’t even at home, unloading the car. I was with Toby.†I can’t stop thinking about the pain and skill required to summarize the terrible state of affairs in her heart so neatly and lyrically. She offers up her own account for our scrutiny and twists the knife in her own gut by making sure to give Adam his say. She’s earned the exhausted, angry “I don’t know what to do with you†he mutters her way when they arrive home, and she knows it.
A weird thing about the Void is that in its infinite emptiness, it’s also a source of infinite potential. Depleted as she is, Libby is still thinking about potential. It’s her great theme as a person and as a writer: how we identify and use our potential, how it leads us to make choices that close us off to other choices, how we squander it, how we wake up one day and wonder where it all went. She’s out of work and out of sorts, compelled to tell stories but believing nobody will care. Why not just holler it all into the Void? What’s the worst that could happen?
Tchotchkes & Things
• It flashes by so quickly that I want to make sure to highlight the dreadful and funny title of Archer’s piece about trying to Columbus his way into a personal cure for insomnia: “A Tribe Called Rest.â€
• One more word on Seth and his emergence as a worthy candidate for the C.K. Dexter Haven Award for Unsuspected Depth (a very real and, okay, slightly shady award I bestow on occasion). I mean, we could see this coming, right? You don’t cast Adam Brody, generational king of portraying callow youths who mature into pretty decent fellows (and, for the record, the only actual good boyfriend in the history of Gilmore Girls) just to play a callow youth for life.