Dear Friends,
For ‘New(ish) Books,’ I usually write one fiction and one non-fiction review. This week, it’s just one novel - Acts of Service - which affected me deeply and which I found I had a lot to say about.
Just as a little reminder, there is an ‘upgrade to paid’ button on the Substack. I really love writing these, but it does take time, and it is important for writing to be remunerated. Etc, etc. As always, many thanks for reading and engaging.
All best,
Sam
LILLIAN FISHMAN’s Acts of Service (2022)
I’ve been terrified of this book - and for good reason. It’s an epochal work and hits right at the fault-line of so many of our collective hang-ups.
The underlying conflict in Acts of Service is generational. Eve, Fishman’s protagonist, is queer and Left, woke, and with an ironclad ethical system, of which she is a somewhat reluctant but nonetheless believing adherent. “Up until this point I had spent a lot of time talking myself out of the things I liked so that I could be a different, better kind of person” is how she summarizes her worldview. “Over the previous decade I had talked myself all the way from an attraction to women into a political commitment to lesbianism and all the way from a general pleasure in the indulgence of life into a bitter shame towards all the trifling things I used to enjoy.”
The action of the novel is, of course, to shatter that cozy morality - for each one of Eve’s precepts to be wrenched out of her by the force of her attraction to Nathan. And what’s objectionable about Nathan are things that would really only matter through a very particular generational and political prism - that he has slept with hundreds of women, one of whom works for him; that his taste is traditional (“he liked the things that everybody liked and the difference seemed to be that he got them”); that he seems to float through life without any consequences, as if it were all a pleasure garden, “a vast world of infinite freedoms”; and, really, worst of all, that he works as a money manager, running a ‘private family investment office in Manhattan.’ But, within the logic of wokeism and, most critically, of feminism, Nathan represents the enemy - and Eve’s seduction by him, the gradual shedding of her old personality and value-system, her recognition of her sexual powerlessness towards him and the pleasure she receives from that powerlessness (“Not one day had passed since I met Nathan that I did not feel under his thumb, and yet I chose him again and again”) are understood to be a betrayal of everything that she holds sacred and an opening-up into something very different, a state of mind that’s not just hedonistic in the normal sense of the term but that believes fervently in the sanctity of desire, and in which, as Nathan puts it, “there is a deep loyalty to what [one] wants.”
The shattering of Eve’s psyche - and, with it, the shattering of the norms of an entire generation and way of being - occurs in three different stages. First, there is the undoing of Eve’s hard-won queerness. “When I came to New York queerness rose in me like a faith,” she says. “I found that there were shared beliefs, shared systems, not among all queer people but among a set to whom queerness meant a specific type of ethical awareness.” Queerness is seen to be an excavating of the deep truth about oneself - “among queer people self-knowledge seemed especially important because we engaged in a continuous process of recovering, of dredging up what we had suppressed, and of interrogating what we had assumed” - and it is taken for granted that that search will lead in the end to one’s natural orientation, which had been buried under various layers of social conventions. But Eve’s excavation takes her in an unexpected direction - to the realization that her queerness was largely contrived, a youthful experiment (“as young women we had stumbled through a trapdoor into a small, bright place”), and that she chose to continue with it, in large part because it was the safer option and not actually because it was the deeper truth. “I never admitted it to anyone but the fact was that if you’d talked to me in my sleep I would have told you that it was impossible to choose between men and women,” Eve informs the reader at one point. I think it would be a little hard outside of the cultural environment that Eve is in to convey just how heretical this whole chain of ruminations really is. When I was growing up, in a very similar environment to Eve’s, it was gospel that homosexuality was nature not nurture, that there was discovery and reckoning but no choice involved in being gay, and Eve’s journey in Acts of Service brings her into a very different dispensation, and far removed also from jaunty ‘bisexuality.’ As Eve says, later on in the book, “It was as though all the questions I cared most about - desire, sex, gender, attention, intimacy, vanity and power - were placed for display on a table between the three of us,” and sexual orientation becomes not exactly a process of self-discovery but of self-creation, and emphasis is placed on making the decisions that are, at the same time, the most difficult and most exhilarating. As Nathan puts it, “Comfortable doesn’t have anything to do with sex - do you understand?”
Eve moves out of her contrived queerness without too much difficulty - even within the dynamic between her, Nathan, and their third paramour Olivia, it becomes quickly apparent that, more than anything in the world, she simply prefers having sex with Nathan. The second shattering of Eve’s psyche occurs in the domain of polyamory and group sex. The impulse that she starts the novel with is a free love-ish recognition that, even in her happy relationship with Romi, she is undersexed. “My body was crying out that I was not fulfilling my purpose. I was meant to have sex - probably with some wild number of people,” she says. And a little later, “For the shine of life, I thought, immense teams were required: men were required, women were required, respect and disrespect were required, love and the lust of hatred required.” But, as it turns out, the fantasies of promiscuity or group sex dissipate fairly quickly. She really is only interested in Nathan and, to some extent, Olivia. The saddest sections of Acts of Service are towards the end when the thruple breaks apart and Eve tries to replicate the experience with other partners, without any success. And the issue, as it turns out, is that Eve isn’t actually aroused by the ’60-ish possibility of equal exchange with different partners - she craves the feeling of being part of an aristocracy of attractiveness, in which power and the sense of superiority are inextricably interwoven with desire. As Eve says of Nathan, “It made me angry, the precision of his control, how he enjoyed the certainty of his power even more than he enjoyed giving pleasure,” and it’s this unflagging mastery that is understood to be his central attribute and to be at the very core of sexuality. This is taken often to the point of absurdity - there are many descriptions of Nathan’s potency in signaling for drinks or ordering a cab on his cell phone (“Nathan requested the check with an efficiency that implied natural superiority for which he need not apologize. He was flawlessly polite and yet he moved with a swiftness that seemed, even in this small gesture, to indict everyone still loafing around in Bar Pleiades”) - but, in the world Fishman constructs, this superiority is fact, as attested to by Nathan’s many lovers and by his place in the social pecking order. And, again, this set of reflections is, on the generational level, heretical. The millennials Fishman is writing about are the first generation (that I’m aware of) in which thruples, polyamory, ethical non-monogamy, etc, is dealt with openly, considered to be a fairly normal way of being (“there was nothing particularly shocking about the suggestion,” says Eve when first propositioned by Olivia and Nathan), but all of that is predicated on some idea of good behavior, mutual respect within sexuality, as in the endless rules and codes of conduct for which the poly community is famous. What Eve discovers, though, via Nathan, is that sex is amoral - that ‘safewords’ ruin it, that explanation ruins it, that it’s fundamentally, as Nathan says, “a magic trick” - and the magic runs along the lines of power imbalances. In other words, there is no such thing as ‘ethical non-monogamy’ (and, for that matter, probably, no such thing as ‘ethical monogamy’). Sex is a deviation from any social rules and is understood to be the x-ray, the hard reality, of who people really are. “It takes a little bit of sex to remember you don’t really know people when you see them on the street,” Eve says early on in the novel. And, later, Nathan adds to the thought: “Why can’t we simply enjoy it? It’s a special thing. People are interesting sexually even if they’re uninteresting in other ways. We’re not socialized into it as thoroughly as we are into everything else.”
The third shattering of Eve’s psyche is the most painful and occurs in the domain of feminism. This had been the largely subterranean tension of the novel - the real gist of all the somewhat meandering pre and post-coital conversations Eve has with her two lovers. Of course, the gospel of our era - the era I grew up in - is the inherent strength and self-sufficiency of women; the assumption that, once patriarchal constraints are removed, the male gaze averted, a certain educational reprogramming achieved, then all the familiar patterns of female subjugation will be gone for good. But this vision - advanced in thousands upon thousands of articles, of strong female protagonists in books and shows - kept running aground on some home truths of female desire, namely the connection between submission and sexual gratification, the possibility that, at the end of the unleashing of sexual desire, and within the ethic of radical honesty, the wild woman may discover that what she most wants is to be disposable. This is what Eve wrestles with throughout Acts of Service. Of her first night with Nathan and Olivia, she says:
Nathan moved between Olivia and me as though we were neighboring islands. I felt warm and stupid under the beam of his attention. Yet this drive to impress him was so great it could not be intellectualized or dismissed through any justifications of the mind. In this hour, in Nathan’s apartment, he seemed utterly capable of determining our value.
And a little later there is the anguished question:
Was his the true genius and all our hard-won ideas about the geniuses of women only flimsy and temporary - or was it simply the appearance of genius rather than the reality of it? Was I being tricked or shown some truth deeper and older than any to which I had eagerly subscribed?
And, towards the novel’s end, comes the answer: “Yes, I said. I thought I would cry. The truth of it felt miserable, impossible, ecstatic. I know, Nathan said. I knew. It’s not coercion, not at all. Not a little bit. I know what you want and I give it to you.” By the time the novel’s deus ex machina arrives - a feminist lawyer - there is no undoing the libidinal knowledge that Eve has obtained. And, when asked, at the critical moment in a deposition, her views on feminism (this is a very 2020s novel), Eve replies, “[Nathan] has made me very happy. Both me and Olivia. His awareness of difference, as you’re calling it - it’s served me as much as it’s served him. Maybe even more.” This whole set of reflections runs very deep. It goes far beyond what Nathan airily dismisses as Eve’s “straightforward rape fantasy” - and is a type of conversation that we are almost completely incapable of having in our public space. Artists get at it - Lana Del Rey in music;
in literature. I think it’s what Muriel Rukeyser was thinking of in her line, “What would happen if a single woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” This is the domain of what used to be called the ‘bad boys’ and is now called the ‘charismatic narcissists’ - an experience, shared by so many women of my acquaintance, of some sexual relationship, often illicit and shameful, that runs completely outside of any social norms, outside of any respect for self-worth, and which is ultimately all about power relations, all about the physiological relationship between sexual desire and submission to power, and which, when it is talked about at all, is talked about in hushed tones, as the most meaningful, authentic dynamic in a person’s life. But this goes beyond just individual sexual relationships - the idea being that sex is the key to finding the truth, which is way beyond the realm of morality, in the place where real power, real desire, real art all converge, a messy, unnameable place completely unaccounted for in our political vocabulary. “I thought I cured you of that,” Nathan says at one point, referring to Eve’s orthodox progressivism. And to her reply, “My life?” he says, “Not your life. Politics. This is your life.”I have my misgivings about the conclusions that Eve reaches in her journey. It’s not just that I don’t want these things to be true; I think that they’re not true - or at least not quite. That they kind of belong to art - and that the way of life advocated for by Nathan and, implicitly by Acts of a Service as a whole, is only a partial answer. “A life recognizes the theater in which its keeper appears most real. My life recognized sex,” says Eve. Which is a seductive idea, and has its own integrity, but is also, fundamentally, immature - biting off limited parts of life, interested only in excitement and intensity. The advocates of this kind of high-brow hedonism seem always to have a bizarre disregard for the values of restraint and self-control, of choosing one’s path. There is a truth in what they describe but it’s not the only truth and it may be specific to a particular phase of life. (Paradoxically, the sorts of people who are always pushing you to go outside of your comfort zone have a comfort zone of their own guiding and constraining them - a certain addiction to risk, joined to a terror of the quotidian.)
I don’t quite blame Fishman for the limits of her perspective. Acts of Service is a novel; and it’s understood to be the depiction exactly of a phase. But I do think there is something fundamentally a bit naive in her worldview - as encapsulated by the novel’s last line. And Acts of Service is far from a perfect book. The Romi character is mishandled - she is carefully set up as a foil to the Nathan/Olivia trio and then is summarily dropped. There are long sections towards the middle where the narrowness of the fictional universe becomes apparent. And Fishman runs into the usual problem of depicting wonderfully charismatic characters - which is that something is lost in the translation to the page; that that do seem less than overpoweringly charismatic any time they open their mouths. Nathan is a bit underwhelming, to the extent that it nearly ruins the whole novel. When we talks he sounds suspiciously like some ancien régime voluptuary - the Marquis de Sade of 83rd and Park. Fishman finds herself leaning heavily on the descriptions of his facility in signaling for the check, his excellent taste in white wines, as well as, naturally, the “weight and friction of his pelvis.” And, in the novel’s weakest section, she zeroes in on the orgasmic thrill of witnessing Nathan fire someone. “After Nathan fires someone I just feel the most intense release,” says Olivia, Bond-villainishly. “It’s amazing. So free, so clear. And it’s intensely erotic, having seen him do this - so well, you know, with so much poise and determination - even though he’s miserable, of course.”
But Fishman saves herself from being a yuppie-ish Fifty Shades of Grey just in time - humanizing Nathan before the end, in moments of him just doodling on a paper tablecloth, in the realization that, as Eve reflects, “I had to have known somewhere that Nathan was not so powerful as he imagined.” And Fishman can really write. Her style is the short-sentenced, hyper-observational mode as cultivated in the MFA programs and as sort of went platinum through Sally Rooney. An offstage character is described simply as a “blond wound.” Olivia’s entire personality is neatly conveyed in: “Olivia began to disassemble a cauliflower tart with her fork.” And her mannerisms in: “Olivia gave an embarrassed tilt of her head as though she were shrugging off a petting hand.” In a way that’s relatively rare, and truly masterful, Fishman is able to tack from this kind of pointillist observation to philosophical digressions, which are mostly about her generation’s attitudes towards sex. What Acts of Service becomes, in the end, is the first great Gen Z novel - the fictional universe firmly embedded in a vision of progressive justice, an understanding that certain types of “cold, educated white men in well-appointed rooms” are the enemy, but without that perspective collapsing into dogma, with the characters grappling in very human, very painful ways with the challenges to their assumptions; and finding that the human spirit is much richer, more tangled, than politics could ever suggest it to be.