Books
Book review: The Pisces
This painfully honest book will divide readers, but delight some
June 14, 2018 08:12
This painfully honest book will divide readers, but delight some
June 14, 2018 08:12It’s unlikely that Melissa Broder knew when conceiving her new novel that fish-human relationships would be in vogue by the time it was published. Nonetheless, hot on the heels of The Shape of Water comes The Pisces, (Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99) about a woman falling for a merman and the complications that ensue.
That aside, Broder’s book has little in common with Guillermo del Toro’s film, focusing less on inter-species coupling or fantasy, and more on the perhaps thornier topics of modern love, sexual politics and surviving mental illness.
The author of the no-holds-barred memoir, So Sad Today, which covered everything from Broder’s confused Jewish identity to her addictions and her failing marriage, poet and writer Broder is no stranger to writing about depression or providing explicit detail on what goes on between the sheets.
Lucy, the lost, damaged heroine of The Pisces may not be Broder, but one imagines some of the episodes in the story are at least borrowed from real life — and likewise that some of Lucy’s eventual realisations about herself are ones Broder, too, has reached.
We meet Lucy while she is dog-sitting for her sister in Venice beach — recently dumped, her PhD going nowhere, and facing a crisis of confidence. Over the course of a summer, she tries to come to terms with her status — late thirties, single and generally at odds with the world — via a combination of group therapy and tinder dating. Only when she meets the merman, a hunky surfer type with an unparalleled understanding of Lucy’s sexual needs, does she begin to truly understand what she wants out of her life.
Broder’s style won’t be for everyone; the far-fetched plot, for example, or the self-obsessed heroine, the Valley girl-speak, and the excruciatingly detailed sex scenes (one episode in particular in a hotel bar bathroom will be hard to scrub from your mind long after you put the book down). But she’s also witty and observant, not least with her vicious takedown of therapy culture, her assessment of commitment phobia, and she is unflinchingly honest about the privileges and problems facing adults today. Like The Shape of Water, this may divide opinion, but fans of Broder’s past work will relish it.