A lost contemporary classic, Fish Tales takes us on a spin through the high-rolling, high-spirited, high times of a woman in 1970s New York and Detroit.
A burst of authentic energy, a rush of life from start to finish ... It is a unique adventure, unafraid to display the grittiness and brutal ecstasy of a life of fast liaisons. At the time of its original release Fish Tales was dismissed as smut by some readers. This is not accurate. The novel is about far more than the enjoyment of sex—it is about a sadness and pain that cannot be erased by bright city lights. It is a story of trauma, confusion, lost souls, and a wrathful love that may never know peace.
Still breathtaking and shockingly bawdy ... Far more daring for its time than any of the recent literary trends that have had everyone blushing and gasping and scribbling. It is as sexy as novels by Sally Rooney, as druggy as novels by Tao Lin, as gross as novels by Ottessa Moshfegh, as queer as novels by Garth Greenwell, as violent as Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. In most of these respects, it exceeds even the work of that polymath of outrage, Bret Easton Ellis—and he published his first novel, Less Than Zero, in 1985, a year later ... Nettie Jones, now eighty-four, was simply ahead of her time ... described in unflinching detail ... Breathtaking and brutal, disorienting and delightful ... The subject matter of the novel may still seem edgy to the easily shocked, but its style is what feels cutting edge to me: fragmented yet smooth, autofictional though not confessional, somehow both tight and loose ... A masterpiece of narrative voice. Jones knows her way around a metaphor ... But praise the muses that Fish Tales has been brought back to life in this one, so we can appreciate just how avant-garde it was. Its voice is as clear and intimate and alive as it must have sounded to its best readers four decades ago. It reminds me of what it feels like when you’re on the phone with someone, and they start telling you their secrets, and you stay up listening late into the night, into the dawn, utterly gripped right until the moment the line disconnects.
Why do I feel both violated and validated by a story so intricate and convoluted that it must be at least half autobiographical? ... Transgressive to the point of exhilarating, Nettie Jones’s prose avoids etiquette or the impulse to virtue signal ... There is no one quite like Lewis in the literary canon.
