Acts of Service: "A sex masterpiece" (Guardian)

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I just wanted something more, and I kept waiting for it to end in a way that brought meaning to the experience, but it felt more like it fizzled out.

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. One night when I was feeling exceptionally beautiful and isolated I decided to start sharing the nudes online.But I honestly think these effects are important to discuss, and Lillian Fishman opens the door to a bit of that dialogue over power and desire. But then again, that danger can also be an attraction, and what do you do when you are attracted to what you find horrible? The perfect read for fans of Raven Leilani and Ottessa Moshfegh, this is a book that will have people talking. It’s obvious Fishman set out, on some level, to examine and expose weighty issues around sex and sexuality – or at least weighty from her perspective.

Some interesting conversations around sexuality took place, including the narrators queer identity in congruence and sometimes battle with her being in a sexual relationship with a man, and her relationships with her girlfriend as well as the woman the narrator and Nathan have threesomes with. from my perspective, this novel adds nothing to what i do not already know - we find both desire and pleasure in unhealthy relationships and that we do occasionally succumb to gender norms regardless of how headstrong we are. The poles of Romi’s nobility were her self-­sacrificing nature and her absolute insusceptibility to the superficial.But it’s not clear to me what’s meant to be somehow universal about Eve’s experiences and what’s supposed to be unique to her as a fictional character. I can’t believe this well written story of Acts of Service, by Lillian Fisherman’s is her first novel. In the way that only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. even eve, despite being the protagonist, is defined only by her sexuality and has no other interests in goals.

Come se il corpo, con il propellente del sesso, fosse una navicella spaziale che ci permette di esplorare nuove galassie. But wrapping it up with a story where even though he is most likely a horrible person, it doesn't matter because he is a man and she likes being fucked by him, therefore, anything he did to other women doesn't matter because it didn't happen to her and she trusts him. That’s the only way her exploration of two queer women’s simultaneous experience of love and sex with the same man makes a lick of sense.Or who thinks he is just so good at reading women that he’s always right, especially in bed, and for the tone of the book and author interviews to have an almost mocking edge where disagreeing or thinking it’s wrong is the entire point? the plot itself is organized chaos: every character is unlikeable and morally gray and toxic in their own way, and every relationship is underlined with degrees of unequal power dynamics and passivity. and this is a very long prelude to saying: that is how this book opens up, and the promise it makes to its readers. These scenes were a particular problem for me, not because of their graphic nature, they’re actually pretty tame.

Fishman builds the novel on that confusion, showing us instead that not everything has to be resolute, not everything can have set answers. on some level i am partly to blame for this negative review (i have read one too many novels about young women involving themselves in relationships with older men and i know they annoy me more often than not) but this one is uniquely bad. 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.The only part that thrilled me was repeatedly refreshing the page to see the photos reconstitute themselves again and again, not in a private folder on my phone but in a shared white room accessible from all corners of the world. It was like looking into the lives of three extremely boring people whilst they tried to muster up a bit of excitement that didn't really make them any less boring. As incisive as it is exhilarating, this novel asks us to face our ideas about desire and power: what sex means to us, the forces that shape it, and how we find-or lose-ourselves in intimacy. But while there were glimmers of insight and memorable lines, those didn’t feel worth reading a whole novel about two women idolizing this insufferable guy. Rather than interrogating the self or society Fishman and co easily project deficiencies on some immoveable external structure, absolving their characters of all guilt .