A provocative debut novel of sex and sexuality as a twentysomething New Yorker pursues a sexual freedom that follows no other lines than her own desire.
As far as [love] triangles go, the one in Lillian Fishman's debut novel Acts of Service is a perfectly messy inquiry into the nature of power and desire...Much of the novel feels like a philosophical inquisition into how to live...Even in the most corpeal scenes, dialog animates the psychic dynamism between [Olivia, Eve, and Nathan]...Physical action between bodies isn't to be trusted at face value any more than Nathan's habit of ashing cigarettes into wine glasses...Like a well crafted stage play, every gesture is loaded with meaning...The way Nathan slaps Olivia feels hot in one moment, only to become cause for concern in the next...Eve's private thoughts interpret many scenes with her feminist, anti-capitalist critique of everything, from Olivia and Nathan's workplace dynamics, to their avoidance of safe words...This constant teetering between pleasure and angst over what Eve feels and what she thinks creates a momentum that relies on exceedingly eccentric complications rather than any expectation of resolution.
Eve, the narrator of Lillian Fishman's Acts of Service, keeps an Eve Babitz quote taped to her wall that she and her roommate reference constantly: 'Any time I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life'...In this novel, the 'dinner party' is a threesome, between Eve—a New York City barista with a 'perfect body'—and a soigné couple, Olivia and Nathan..The book is smart in its triangulations and tensions, and on the question of how a certain set of politically minded young people are supposed to live now...Unfortunately, despite the nod to Babitz, her mischievousness and humor are mostly absent in this book...The sex is loaded with gravitas...Rooms are portentously underlit.
... extraordinary ... a work of ferocious moral and sensual intelligence and a masterly defence of sex for its own sake ... Fishman’s elegant novel ventures an alternative sexual ethic, one unconstrained by conventions but nonetheless fiercely attentive to what we owe one another ... In an age of resurgent puritanism, Acts of Service is a rare and much-needed sex masterpiece.
