...the dirtiest, most bizarre, most original work of fiction I’ve read in recent memory ... Broder has a talent for distilling graphic sexual thoughts, humor, female neuroses, and the rawest kind of emotion into a sort of delightfully nihilistic, anxiety-driven amuse-bouche ... The Pisces is proof that she can sustain this 140- and 280-character knack over hundreds of pages and a narrative arch ... Broder finds something both resonant and amusing in our cultural attraction to these kinds of ultra-romantic death wishes.
The Pisces is many things: a jaunt in a fabulous voice, a culture critique of Los Angeles, an explicit tour of all kinds of sex (both really good and really bad), but possibly most of all, it is a persuasive excavation into what might drive Lucy’s compulsion for a certain kind of connection ... Broder’s voice has a funny, frank Amy Schumer feel to it, injected with moments of a Lydia Davis-type of abstraction that can turn the existence of a woman walking by in skimpy silk shorts into a meditation on meaninglessness. These are often the strongest moves of the novel’s voice: from the minor keen observation into the resonant theoretical. At other times, though, we are so centered in Lucy’s head that the outside world drifts too far away ... By the end, the character and Broder acknowledge something else is going on. There is plenty of lively sex and humor here for readers to relish, but trade Eros for Thanatos for the book’s center — and depth.
Broder has a way of writing about shame that recalls a Zamboni, methodically circling and recircling a surface until it looks clean. But So Sad Today was also, as Broder put it, 'pickled by the Internet,' steeped in the ethos of relatability, of broad-denominator personal identification. In The Pisces, Broder takes her obsessions and gives them a perverted mythological structure, and corrals them within the arbitrary limits of fiction. 'Who was I if I wasn’t trying to make someone love me?' Lucy asks. The question is more interesting—funnier, sadder—when asked in a novel by a person who’s about to put on a skirt so that a merman can perform oral sex on her than it is when asked on Twitter, a platform which takes that question as its fundamental premise ... With [Theo], Broder makes the abject itself into a love interest. Lucy is drawn, in Kristeva’s terms, 'toward the place where meaning collapses.' The Pisces convincingly romances the void.
...we might feel more sympathy for Lucy if she weren’t so sure that her perception...makes her superior to all those oblivious people who manage the chores of daily living at which she’s so proudly inept ... [Broder's] drawn such a persuasive portrait of someone mired in a toxic blend of self-loathing and twisted self-regard that it’s hard to believe Lucy will ever find something outside herself to embrace — except that nothingness, back for two final bows in the last paragraph. Sharply observed and often bleakly funny, The Pisces, like its anti-heroine, is encased in a carefully constructed private universe that anyone with a broader perspective is likely to find stifling.
In many wonderful ways, Broder shows us what such a reprieve from linear thinking actually looks like: Lucy’s stretch of living alongside the Pacific initiates an enchanting release of rationality and logic—and, in turn, an even fuller embrace of her ego, that part of the psyche most in touch with external reality ... At times the inability of these characters to ever find fault in themselves, and their devotion to today’s wellness industrial complex, is just plain frustrating. But to this Broder adds hilarious and unflinching characterizations ... Broder interlaces into The Pisces contemplations on the Ancient Greeks, though thankfully she never goes too deep and keeps it a light and brisk affair.
Broder is a pro at writing cringe-worthy sex scenes that explore the boundaries of consent, but her true talent is documenting the unsung anxious rituals that sometimes surround dating ... It would be easy to dismiss Lucy as a foil for Broder and to write them both, author and character alike, off as insufferable. Lucy’s uncomfortable confessions match Broder’s essay collection So Sad Today in their frantic key, and some of the novel’s dialogue even matches the conversations she documents in her nonfiction ... Yet Broder has Lucy confess to the things so many of us spend our lives trying to hide that it is a relief to see them finally reflected back on the page ... Broder opens up a fantastical vein to offer a glimpse at how we might find each other again. Like her poetry and her essays, her first foray into fiction shows that she is unashamed to look directly at how unflattering desire can make us and how unruly our bodies can be, all to reassure us that we aren’t, after all, alone.
In its first half, it’s a bleakly funny story of its protagonist, Lucy, house- and dog-sitting for her sister in Los Angeles as she grapples with the aftereffects of a terrible breakup in Phoenix ... Alternately: for all that adding a human/merman tryst into this novel comes as a departure from what’s come before, the fact that this novel doesn’t double down on its paranormal elements is significant ... In the end, The Pisces is a novel that eludes any form of easy classification, and it’s all the stronger for it.
Melissa Broder writes about the void. She approaches the great existential subjects — emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, death and boyfriends — as if they were a collection of bad habits. That’s what makes her writing so funny ... Broder deftly catches the victims of victimhood in her satirical glance, but she also recognizes frailty when she sees it ... Broder carries us along, even as we shake our heads. The book is uneven, but it has great momentum, like waves hitting the rocks ... The Pisces is part satire, part fairy tale and, sometimes jarringly, part meditation on addiction.
It's funny...as misanthropy can be when expressed so savagely ... Despite the often cynical tone of Lucy’s narration, the writing blazes with vibrancy that in part stems from Broder’s refusal to make her especially likeable. In this way the book resembles the new wave of female authors taking a much-needed swing at the societal myths surrounding conformity and normativity, from Chris Kraus to Leila Slimani.
In this bizarre novel, Broder fuses existential malaise and destructive love with a heavy dose of sexual fantasy. The characters are remarkably complex, but be warned the storyline is extremely graphic in its sexual portrayals and accounts. The explicit descriptions of these carnal encounters are somewhat disturbing and gratuitous in their titillation ... Broder’s mixture of straightforward bluntness is unsettling at times but curiously compelling. Her use of darkly humorous realism gives true voice to the depiction of those who are battling depression and suicide ... Often unsettling, peculiar, sexually graphic, unapologetically explicit, but fascinatingly gripping.
Unlike The Shape of Water, Broder’s novel has sexual situations and interactions that feel alarmingly realistic. There’s no romanticism. Instead there’s only delusion and inevitable embarrassment ... The only place Broder slides into magic realism is by giving Theo a tail. The rest of The Pisces is about the all-too-human crawl from immaturity into responsibility. In The Pisces, romanticism dies in a ditch—but perhaps Lucy had to fuck a fish to become human.
Unlikable, irredeemable female narrators have long been underrepresented in mainstream fiction, yet...Broder do[es] fall into a lineage of women authors like Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus who have written about difficult, transgressive women ... Lucy has no intention of doing any form of self-improvement beyond buying some hot and prohibitively expensive lingerie that she wears to her date that ends on the bathroom floor ... There are so many scenes of her debasement that it comes as a relief to join Lucy in wishful thinking for once, even though it’s clear this story can’t have a happy ending ... How rarely do women feel like they have the freedom to wallow? Instead, they’re constantly inundated with new ways to improve themselves—diets, meditations, fitness trackers, serums and vitamins and sheet masks. What a joy, then, to spend some time within a fantasy where a woman can be free of the tyranny of constant self-improvement.
This is love in the age of consumer capitalism, and Broder is pin-sharp on its disillusionments ... Despite the bad-sex scenes and dark humor, this is no comedy. (Though there is some unintentional humor from the malapropian slang used by the British character who dismisses a lingerie shop with 'Victoria’s Secret? It’s faff!') It’s a knife-tip dissection of 21st-century anomie, and its clear-sighted depiction of muddy-headed people makes for bracing reading—like a dip in the freezing, salty sea.
In a banner year for woman-falls-for-sea-creature stories Lucy, a wry and lovable lost soul, tells a tale that’s all her own ... In her first novel, essayist, poet, and Twitter-star Broder wraps timeless questions of existence—those that gods and stars have been beseeched to answer for millennia—in the weirdest, sexiest, and most appealing of modern packaging. Brilliant and delightful.
On the surface, this audacious novel from Broder is a frank exploration of desire, fantasy, and sex. But it dives deeper, too, seeking out uncomfortable topics and bringing them into the light: codependency, depression, suicidal ideation, and an existential fascination with the void each get their days in the sun ... This isn’t just a novel about navigating the dangers of codependency, but an attempt to learn how we all might love better in a culture that pushes even its strongest women to the brink of self-destruction. A fascinating tale of obsession and erotic redemption told with black humor and biting insight.
Broder evokes the details of bad sex in wincingly naturalistic detail, and even if the good sex is a little more soft-focus, it makes for a satisfying fantasy. Broder makes her merman a more complex and believable character than most romantic heroes; her novel is a consistently funny and enjoyable ride.
