PanThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The setup has promise – there is plenty of fun to be had in lampooning contemporary purity spirals – and I did briefly wonder whether Fishman’s novel was going to evolve into an elegant satire. But already the writing at this point has a humourless and slightly score-settling tone. For Eve, pleasure-seeking with Nathan is a deliberate sin against shallowly appropriated queerness ... her overintellectualized solipsism is grounded in a class privilege and cultural malaise that both she and Fishman fail to critique ... The denouement offers a few promising set pieces. Nathan has been accused of sexual misconduct at work and needs Eve as an alibi. There follows an interesting interrogation by the prosecution’s lawyers, which might have formed the basis of a clear-sighted and mature examination of #MeToo. But Fishman isn’t really interested in looking at the world in this way: her story seems to be aiming at allegory, but ends up in an uncomfortable halfway house between that and realism, in the end achieving neither ... curiously unsexy sex. There is nothing very new here and the result is thus quite boring. I was already aware that desire and politics are often misaligned. I was already aware of the difficulties of sloughing off my own oppression. And, rather than all the philosophizing, I longed for the fleshy descriptions of Anaïs Nin, the fantasies of Nancy Friday or even the thrilling nihilistic misanthropy of Ottessa Moshfegh – to be taken inside the body, to enjoy the physical pleasure of desire. Acts of Service made me yearn for writing that is erotic as well as neurotic ... My problem with novels in which wealthy, beautiful characters lounge around post-coitus and discuss the meaning of their desire isn’t who they sleep with, and in what way, but how disembodied they tend to be. In Fishman’s world the physical self is something to be observed rather than enjoyed. Everything is freighted with so much meaning that it becomes impossible to be sensual. Above all, the author seems to forget that hungry bodies don’t all have the same attitude to desire, and neither do traumatized ones, or impoverished ones, or fat ones, or disabled ones, or queer ones. For all her characters’ agonized reflections, Lillian Fishman makes no attempt to get us under the skin of individual desire, so all we can do is watch, voyeurs in the spectacle of Eve, who, like so many millions of women before her, gets off, and is to an extent dependent, on submissive heterosexual sex in order to parse her sense of self.
