Excellent novel about sexual obsession and grey areas around consent which I have recommended twice on Five Books

A tense and evocative debut which looks at sexuality and it's power in it's entirety. A enthralling read and a definite conversation starter.

Full review to come.

I found this book frustrating and dull. It’s just a series of anecdotes more than anything else, a supposedly “feminist” take on the affair novel that just feels gratuitous and boring.

Eve is in a relationship with her girlfriend Romi and she’s in love with her, but at the same time she feels the need for more. That’s the reason why one day she posts some nude pictures of herself on social media, and she gets a message from a stranger, Olivia, asking her to meet. When she goes to meet Olivia, though, she realises that the woman is in a deeply complex relationship with a charming man, Nathan, and the three of them start to meet in secret. After a while, Eve begins to question Nathan’s intentions and she suspects he might be manipulative, but she suppresses her worries, at least until life won’t push her to make a decision.

This book left me with lots of food for thought. It made me think about the delicate balance between healthy and unhealthy relationships, and it also posits interesting questions about consent and sexuality. At the same time, the novel felt somewhat flat, as if there wasn’t enough movement in it. Some sentences are truly beautiful, but the prose is generally quite static. I’d say I appreciated what the book was trying to achieve more than I actually enjoyed it. It’s an interesting read, but I do think it could be altogether more enjoyable.

•thanks to #netgalley and the publisher for the #ARC in exchange for an honest review•

This was a quick read which explores different types of relationships. Whilst some parts of this book were an interesting insight into unconventional relationships I felt that we could have gone a bit deeper into getting to know the characters and why they were the way they were.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was a great read - super easy and flowed so nicely. I raced through it which is always a good sign!

Acts of Service is a daring and provocative debut. A quick and, to some extent, an easy read.

Eve is a young bisexual woman that prefers women. She gets sexually involved with a straight couple, Nathan and Olivia. Even though she is at first attracted to Olivia, she is later mainly involved with Nathan. Nathan’s acts are often on the edge of manipulation, but both Eve and Olivia are obsessed with him.

For me, all MCs are pretty unlikeable. A novel consists mainly of conversations and considerations of sex, sexuality, and desire. Maybe I would also expect some moral dilemma, but there was not much of this. The novel raises some interesting questions, but they often overlap, and sometimes it turns out confusing. In the end, I expected a more thorough examination of some themes.

This novel, at first, drew me in, and I liked it. But then came parts I didn’t like so much and some that even bored me.

Thanks to Europa Editions UK for the ARC and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review and all opinions are my own.

An interesting read, and certainly a well-written one. The protagonist is an interesting guide, and Fishman's prose is evocative, flows nicely, and is sometimes rather amusing.
Recommended.

I very much enjoyed this book! It felt ferociously visible and exciting to read. I was as caught up in the in Eve's exploration of herself as she was. I was especially impressed by the handling of the dialogue, though there was a lot of it Fishman never let it feel like that there was too much.

This post-feminist novel made me feel old. It’s about a young queer woman, Eve, who is bored with her perfect girlfriend and posts nude pictures online. She is contacted by a straight couple with whom a sort of love triangle (or better ‘sex triangle’) develops. In particular she submits to the dominant (and insufferably arrogant) boyfriend. Eve uses these sexual encounters to explore questions related to her sexuality and personality – fortunately not so much the morality of what she is doing – which would have been boring – but rather questions such as: what do my bodily desires say about me as a person? By defining myself as queer have I confined myself to being a type of person that has to hold certain opinions and move in pre-defined circles? There is a lot of such introspection which flows quite naturally from the conversations between the main characters. As such, I found the plot an effective device to explore these questions, which to be frank are not always top of my mind.

Acts of Service was, above all else, a little confusing to me. It's a perfectly fine read but I felt like I was never able to fully grasp the meaning behind it all. I understand the surface level - we're discussing desire, sexuality, identity, power and control, guilt - but I didn't manage to burrow myself into it or be completely sold.

I tried to write this review whilst omitting any comparisons with Sally Rooney, but these comparisons are so easy to draw. It's very much in the vein of Rooney's novels in that there's a tangible distance between you and the novel you're reading, as well as using devices with the intention of provocation (cheating, withholding information, inappropriate relationships). If Rooney works for you in spite or despite of these things, this will probably work for you as well.

I don't know how to feel about everything mentioned above. I feel like I wasn't presented with any concrete opinions or ideas, I was moreso presented with a natural flow of situations without commentary. Should that be the purpose, then I'd have to say job well done, but I can't say that it specifically worked for me. I prefer when I can still feel the author through the text that I'm reading, but that's, of course, just personal preference.

The most interesting discussion it opened was the topic of Eve identifying as a lesbian and then subsequently feeling guilty for striking up a sexual relationship with a man, bearing the feeling that she owed her community something. It is something to ponder, the fluidity of our sexuality and whether we are ever publicly allowed to grow and change. Whether we are allowed that fluidity/whether we FEEL like we allowed it. However, I will say that the absence of bisexuality was not my favorite.

Overall I think this would be a good book club read if you're into this kind of contemporary fiction and the writing is really good, in my opinion, but I needed more from the characters (side characters definitely don't feel fleshed out) and expected more resonance and opinions in the text itself. Felt kind of empty in the end.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman is the tale of a young Gay woman,Eve,a Barista in her late 20's,and her somewhat messy relationships. Despite having a steady partner, paediatrician Romi ,she seeks some excitement and posts nude pictures of herself online. She's contacted by loads of men,, who she ignores,and Olivia, a woman who intrigues her and they arrange to meet. It soon becomes evident that Olivier has been "bait" for her partner Nathan and a rather complicated menage a troi ensues. Most of the rest of the book revolves around Eve's thoughts on whether one or both of the women involved in the triangle are being exploited as the whole situation is quite complicated.

This book has apparently generated acclaim as provocative and daring, I'm not sure I'd call it either, Eve isn't a very likeable character and prone to rambling navel-gazing at great,and tedious, length while Nathan is a bit of a Poundland psychologist and Olivia flits around in the shadows.
Not much actually happens until quite near the end when finally it appears there's some kind of point to the book. Amidst more introspection from Eve what appeared to be a big build up just fizzles out.
The premise is quite interesting but it didn't work for me ,too pedestrian and wordy. There are some interesting issues raised and the build up is promising but after Eve and Nathan's first meeting it all goes a bit flat and page after page of Eve self-analysing left me cold I'm afraid.

This opens with pages of quotes from authors whose names I recognise, even if I've not read them, praising its "deep eroticism and stunning prose". Apparently it's "an erotic, cerebral, subversive and tormenting tale, a reckoning formed in the cracks between certainties, like the cooling magma that rises between tectonic plates, between voyeurism and complicity, intimacy and alienation, the body and the mind." "This book asks us to consider what it might mean to truly honour our own desires, however messy they might be. I loved it." Meaning I found myself nonplussed once the novel proper got underway and displayed that odd bloodlessness which seems to suffuse so much of contemporary American writing about kink, where they describe scenes which ought to have been hot in tones which feel more appropriate to a furniture catalogue. Maybe just to put some unimpeachable distance between themselves and actual porn? Worse, though, is the way the set-up seemed so carefully calibrated to offer the absolute minimum level of transgression which can still put the wind up the extremely online (and there are already Goodreads reviews testifying to that bait having been gulped down just as eagerly as it ever was by the moral arbiters of earlier generations).

So: narrator Eve is in her late twenties and works in a coffee shop. One day, without telling her paediatrician girlfriend Romi, she posts some nudes online, and is contacted by Olivia, who when they meet for a date, turns out to be acting as a catspaw for her boyfriend, Nathan. Unicorn-hunters? Who are not immediately rebuffed? If you are shocked and appalled then congratulations, and I hope those pearls you're clutching were ethically sourced. Consider also: Nathan has a lucrative Wall Street-type job, and is Olivia's boss. Was her boss when they got together, in fact. But despite Eve's obsession with how Nathan moves, speaks, acts "as though he had never experienced doubt", his air of effortless command, he didn't make a move on Olivia, because that might feel a little too properly dangerous, mightn't it? No, she made the first move, notwithstanding how shy she comes across the rest of the time. The eroticisation of their power differential, which in a novel coming out now could have felt like a genuinely shocking and potentially interesting theme, always needs the guardrail of her topping from the bottom: "Tell me you won't pay me if I don't suck your cock, I heard Olivia say to him more than once". Likewise, she gets some kind of thrill out of watching him sack people – but lest that exceed the acceptable dose of 400 millishocks, we have to have it established that he hates firing people, isn't getting anything out of it himself. The most desperate example, though, may be the sentence "Who had patience anymore for cold, educated white men in well-appointed rooms?" In other words, this is a narrator so deep in the Discourse that she looks at the most obvious possible type for a woman to fancy, the product that's been pushed on them for decades, and finds the idea of going for that crazily taboo. Now, part of me can admire the idea of going so far around that vanilla choices look kinky again, but at this point I wasn't convinced that Acts Of Service quite had the self-awareness to pull it off.

This is a shame, because there is definitely material here which suggests Fishman does observe and understand things about people and society and desire that could have made for a 21st century She Came To Stay. Eve's analysis of her own journey from fancying girls to queerness becoming the central plank of her identity puts its finger on something I've not seen much discussed in its modern as opposed to 1970s iteration, and I loved her rueful realisation that while on paper she admires the fervently ideological, "I thought I liked earnestness – I liked it in theory, but I was bored by earnest people." Some of the voice of a generation-type material is unimpeachable, if hardly revolutionary: the nothing jobs, the appeal of riding the subway in the middle of the day when "everyone on it had the kind of life in which they were exempted from at least one small set of rules". But elsewhere there are genuinely fascinating questions. Is it easier for a bisexual woman to love a woman, who is like her and has similar experiences of the world, or a man, with whom society tells her she should be? How does the pervasiveness of the male gaze affect sex between women? Too often, though, just as they're beginning to develop, they get swamped by the shine of Nathan's tasteful apartment, or the fancy restaurant where the trio eat expensive cauliflower, scenes where I already know exactly how they'll look in the miniseries adaptation whose faux-prestige sheen will get the usual keen reviews of the first episode, only for it to turn out three weeks later that nobody's still watching. Which is a tragedy, because when the affectless mask slips, there is a beating heart here, one which knows that weird relationship dynamics can be as intellectually fascinating as they are sexy: "I wondered if this was the heart of what I had always looked for – multiplicity, communion, a desire richer and larger than any singular desire, each of our wants absorbing the others and growing into a new kind of animal, ravenous and herculean. My own desire was blameless, swallowed up by the scene." And as the book goes on, much like the characters, it seems more willing to let that inner self show. I never quite lost the sense that that title, also expressed in things like the wonderfully odd yet plausible scene where Eve tries on Romi's scrubs to feel a sort of usefulness by proxy, would have clicked better if the relationship had more than the merest hints of BDSM, and in some respects the plot managed to annoy me even more towards the end, at the same time as the treatment of the themes was feeling increasingly assured. In particular, the late consideration of what wanting means, and the ways of interrogating one's own desires which are and aren't useful, has me interested to see what Fishman writes next, despite all my reservations regarding her debut.

(Netgalley ARC)

This is one hell of a debut! I was absolutely desperate to read this after hearing so many wonderful reviews and I was not disappointed.
A provocative debut exploring sex and sexuality as a twentysomething New Yorker pursues a sexual freedom that follows no lines other than her own desire.
The most powerful feminist voice I have read this year, this novel takes a deep dive into the inner psyche of your most inner desires and really questions the idea of boundaries, privilege and what it is to really want.
I am a fan of the inner dialogue, I loved hearing her thinking it all and just putting it all on the page.

Thank you to Europa Editions for my ARC and my lovely gifts.

Lillian Fishman’s apparently-controversial, debut novel’s centred on Eve. Eve lives in New York, like many people she knows, a parental safety net has allowed her to drift through life, taking dead-end jobs and avoiding any plans for the future. But Eve’s restless, in theory her girlfriend Romi’s perfect, even though the reality of their relationship doesn’t mesh with Eve’s sexual fantasies. But Eve strives to conform to a set of unwritten rules, her politics dictating what desires she will or won’t explore, in her mind “queerness” goes hand in hand with a particular set of ethical choices. Then a chance encounter provides a space to explore the feelings Eve’s tried to suppress and she begins a physical relationship with a stranger, artist Olivia, and her partner wealthy, self-assured Nathan. Nathan’s manipulative, self-contained, and he controls every aspect of Olivia’s existence, seemingly happy to dominate the women around him. Yet Eve finds herself increasingly drawn to him, and to the lifestyle he represents, and then to being submissive to his needs.

Fishman’s trying to deal with a range of overlapping issues here, around identity, class, patriarchy and various forms of power alongside what is/isn’t permissible sexual expression – what is, what should be, what might be forbidden. 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. As a story I couldn’t help viewing this as a variation on Dangerous Liaisons with a dash of Fifty shades… and a hint of Exciting Times. It’s also achingly self-conscious in that now-classic Rooney-esque manner but, unlike, Rooney, it’s also very narrowly-drawn, claustrophobic even. Fishman’s prose is polished but it can also be stagey and the concepts she’s exploring seem more than a little confused and confusing. 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. But, from my perspective, she never really succeeds in going beyond a superficial examination of the topics she introduces.

Fishman has some potentially interesting things to say about the gap between mind and body, self-delusion or naivety, and the constraints of the political as a means to frame individual desire; but these tend to be buried by her insistence on documenting the minutiae of the interactions between Eve, Nathan and Olivia. These scenes were a particular problem for me, not because of their graphic nature, they’re actually pretty tame. But because I just found them so dull – and more than a little cliched, Anais Nin meets soft-core erotica meets The Story of O. It’s also not really clear what Fishman wants to achieve with them. She’s maintained she’s not discussing gender here, but fails to keep it out of her narrative; and I found her assumptions about sex with men versus sex with women - and the possibilities and range of physical interactions between men and women, and crucially women and women - oddly limited and conservative. And that gave the whole exercise an artificial feel.

In addition, a great deal of the novel's taken up with Eve’s continual agonising over her feelings, her wants, her duty to herself or to other women, written in a style that just made me glaze over. About a third of the way through it was impossible not to switch to skimming. So, it may be the case that buried in the narrative are all sorts of fascinating insights, and burning questions, I simply failed to pick up on. There seems to be an overlap between Fishman’s work and Mary Gaitskill’s - Gaitskill’s an admirer of Fishman’s book and recently interviewed her about it. Gaitskill’s another writer who’s got a reputation for provocative, boundary-pushing fiction that also doesn’t work for me, so it's quite possible I just wasn’t the right fit for this one.

While I (sadly) didn't find this as radical and daring as the cover blurb promises, I did find it consistently interesting, opening up conversations that don't, perhaps, get explored as deeply as they could be. It's worth saying upfront that while there's lots of on-page sex, it's not smutty or erotic.

What Fishman does tackle is a range of issues that our cultural mythology doesn't really acknowledge: that loving/romantic relationships aren't necessarily enough to turn off sexual feelings for other people; that sexuality labels might limit bodily acts and that sexual desire may move beyond identities; that questions of submission and consent are more complicated than sexual politics might sometimes infer; that the politics of the gaze still play out - and, perhaps most uncomfortably, that decades of feminist theorising may not have countered (some) women's need for male visual and erotic approval.

The prose can be a bit halting and not quite as smooth and assured as I'd have liked - but this is a strikingly contemporary exploration of urban sex lives that might be fascinatingly messy and uncontained.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman is a novel about sexuality and gender politics. I felt that Olivia and Nathan's characters weren't really fleshed out enough so I lost interest. I found the narrator's interactions with her dad more interesting.

Friends of Sally Rooney will love this book!

A complex, sticky novel of manners looking at the confounding experience of Eve, a young woman who cheats on her girlfriend and becomes involved with a couple whose own dynamic makes the reader question the boundaries of consent and gender roles. Written from Eve’s perspective, it is almost entirely composed of conversations.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.