Acts of Service.
Lillian Fishman.
Hogarth. 2022. 240 pp.
ISBN 978-0593243763.
Acts of Service centers Eve Cook, a buxom barista obsessed with her own body. She moved to New York City young, where "queerness rose in her like a faith," and lives in a made-for-streaming Brooklyn apartment with a chaste roommate, Fatima. We learn in a quick but poignant detail late in the novel—all details spring new traps in this carefully constructed work—that Eve's mother is gone. Her father is still around. "How many cups of coffee can you pour?" he asks on a phone call, in what she calls "this tone of lament" he takes when speaking of "the loss of [her] heterosexual future." In other words, he wants to buy his daughter a Volvo. The novel begins, though, in a moment of homonormative boredom. Eve wants to escape her girlfriend, Romi, a good and honest healthcare worker. (This is before the term "essential" was needed to stratify classes.) Locking herself in the bathroom, Eve snaps fresh nudes of herself and instantly feels straightened as they impulse through the networks and into the hands of a polite painter, Olivia Weil. What happens next, like all true love stories, is more than Eve bargained for.
Meeting Liv for a quiet drink, hoping her online timidity "conceals a little wildness," we learn Liv is actually moonlighting as a procuress for her boss, Nathan Gallagher, a sharp, wealthy, soft-talking cocksman who knows exactly what he wants. Olivia may also find Eve alluring—it's difficult to imagine anyone who wouldn't—but it's Nathan who put Olivia up to responding to Eve's "impossible" nudes. For the majority of the novel's remaining pages, Eve, Olivia, and Nathan throw down at one of Nathan's Upper East Side properties, which, like all such apartments, opens onto itself straight from the elevator. Our trio fuck, eat, smoke (indoors), talk, drink, fuck again, and talk some more. Sexual feats range from the rote to the ravenous, often illuminated by banker's lamps. Why is Eve, who tells us she has a "political commitment to lesbianism," sleeping with Nathan? That question is the philosophical free space in this novel of ideas, and it's one the author never tires of having her narrator ask herself, sometimes to a fault.
"Only when a woman is no longer attractive to men," Shelia Heti suggests in Motherhood, "can you be left with enough time to actually think." This is not true for Fishman's Eve. Thinking, along with sex (often both at the same time), is what she does best, and like the true erotic subject, she has no other interests. Unless needed for plot generation, you never get the sense she's got active accounts, fake or otherwise. This unstinting focus on sex gives the novel much of its politically unfashionable, out-of-time glamor; Eve barely has the strength to critique capitalism, only admitting "there was no justification for me to start accumulating wealth when I'd already benefited so much." And while she does reluctantly accept a normative wokeness, she doesn't want to believe the cost of lattes add up (even with, we presume, her employee discount) any more than she wants to believe the construction site whistles in Manhattan aren't thrilling, in the near-obsolete sense of piercing and producing keen tremors. Tremor is the key here. To mix my natural disasters, Eve's erupting with passion. She repeatedly tells us she is built for sex and sex acts:
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. Maybe it was more savage than that, that I was meant not to fuck but to get fucked. The purpose of my life at large remained mysterious, but I had come around to the idea that my purpose as a body was simple.
Such diaristic conclusions appear on the first pages of many an anonymous pornographic tale: cut-and-pasted throughout Kathy Acker's corpus; inverted by Henry Miller ("I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked."); its artistic hide-and-seek reached, its monocultural zenith razed, in Humbert Humbert's molestation of Dolores. But I more often recalled, with intensifying pleasure as the novel got better and better (once I was through thinking things like, Oh, this Brooklyn's made for Hulu), the devious novels of Alberto Moravia, especially those marked with sex, like The Woman of Rome or The Empty Canvas, which feature soft, wealthy, cruel males falling for ambitionless, ample heroines who, because they're so fine, have logically submitted to a lifetime of shaking what their mamas gave them. While those tragic understudies had few choices—and must surely be partly misunderstood by monolingual American readers like me—Eve Cook, a White American from a tedious Massachusetts town, a girl promised a Volvo, can be anything basic she wants to be. Her refusal to be any of those things makes her cool and inconclusive apathy even more alluring.
Between threesomes, Eve does very little. But she does prepare. Before another session with Nathan and Olivia—or, increasingly, Nathan on his own—she bathes and depilates, prettifying what the reader knows to already be beautiful, in anticipation of the next encounter:
Before I left to meet him I would spend hours in the bathroom, shaving and moisturizing my limbs and my pussy, plucking the hairs from my nipples and my eyebrows, rubbing cream into the reptilian skin between my toes. I chose clothes designed to convey that I was not too available—turtlenecks, oversize pants, heavy boots—and I wore all my rings... in some way I was not myself until I had undressed in Nathan's living room. When I was naked I would think: There she is, that girl I love.
The surface read, a smart one, must ask: why is this lesbian preening herself for a toxic man? Or is the lesbian unconsumable, invisible to the phallus no matter how hard they try (google Eileen Myles: shaved pussy is the new fig leaf)? In a Trump-era novel, are baggy clothes and unpolished fingernails the only way a woman can commit to her political identity? During Eve's longest bouts of self-interviewing for her self-actualization, I asked even more questions. Is she straight? Gay? Queer? Privileged? Where is this girl's mother?? (I never asked that, but someone easily might.) Is she bored? Stoned? What's more misogynistic than faulting a woman for asking too many questions? Are the strap-on and the biocock two peas in a pod? How would the Paul B. Preciado of the Testo Junkie-era approach this novel? Are Preciado's "semiotechnical codes of white heterosexual femininity belonging to the postwar pharamcopornographic political ecology" the reason Eve Cook scrupulously avoids "the manicure"??? Since almost all of this sex is happening in a made-for-Skinemax Manhattan, is Manhattan back, baby? Sex is back, right? Did it ever leave? Did love? Is Acts of Service a novelistic footnote, a set of yearning variations, on Luce Irigaray's thought that in a patriarchy, "Woman exists only as an occasion for meditation, transaction, transition, transference, between man and his fellow man, indeed between man and himself"? Is Eve that Woman? Writing a book she hasn't often been allowed to put her author's real name on? Am I that man? Reading a book that wasn't published for me? As Nathan will have a book written about him that is not written for him? Why isn't Acts of Service on display in the window of the feminist bookstore up the block from my apartment, but Ocean Vuong's Time is a Mother is on display in three places? It makes sense that Acts of Service had me pulling Preciado and Irigaray down from the shelf, right? And had me recalling, natch, Eileen Myles' policing of Blue is the Warmest Color? Is being consumed the same thing as consummation? "To love a woman," Fishman writes, "is to be at sea, to love a man to be on land." In order to stand, I couldn't help thinking, must one stand up to men? Must I as the man that I am think—must I self-authorize to think—only about Nathan, when all I want to do is think about Eve?
"Most people are impossible, Nathan said. When you talk to them it's absolutely tedious. You don't get at who they are at all. At best they're recycling lines from The Atlantic, at worst from the Post. They aren't honest—they don't know what they're doing, they've just picked up all these little signals as to how to act. But when you fuck them—everyone is interesting to fuck."
Eve describes him as "partway into his thirties... but his face was boyish and familiar: It was a face I had seen on young white men getting into cabs all over the city." Like all epic lovers, Nathan wants it both ways. He is the painter and the empty canvas; he is always around and never available; he is meticulous and mute about his interior desires, a man who, trust us, knows what he's doing. "Most people treat threesomes like a birthday party," he tells Eve. Will she figure him out? Yes. But the reader is more like Kim Basinger pawing through Mickey Rourke's unmentionables at the end of 9½ Weeks, hoping she will find anything that could solve her man, other than that he folds his undershirts on a board. Basinger never quite knew what Rourke did, as Carrie really didn't know what Mr. Big did, but Nathan Gallagher works in finance, of course, as the administrator of a Family Office. By his own count, and the guy's good with numbers, he's slept with "hundreds of women."
The choice of Family Office for Nathan and Olivia's workplace is a structural master stroke on the part of Fishman. (It's Eve who doesn't fret about late capitalism, not her creator.) At work, Nathan helps a wealthy family maintain its privacy, just as he does during his off hours with his sex family of Olivia, Eve, and God knows who else. Let's stipulate the purpose of the Family Office is to lie, sadistically, about the meaning of family. That is something Nathan knows a lot about. His offscreen acts of service would include watering the Monets, hosing down the yachts, leaving behind some stained glass from the former structure for tax purposes. Eve sometimes pleads with him in this sheltering direction. We know this guy. But Nathan is also, as a late plot turn will draw out, younger and more vulnerable than your classic family-friendly monster from TV, the foul creationist thrilling the viewer on the road to a world destruction that's entirely his fault, the Learian patriarch—Tony Soprano, Walter White, Clarence Thomas, Bobby Axelrod, Logan Roy—who must always circulate as typical and inevitable in ballroom and barroom dramas, lest we lose our phallocentric place. With Succession's and the Trump family's Family Office still near top of cultural mind, it's easy for the reader to displace Nathan from the impenetrable businessman Fishman likely intends and see him as just another Outlook email address making a few million, someone even Cousin Greg and Jared Kushner can ignore. But those are never the family members we see Nathan interact with in the novel. We only see him with his girls, making the beast, the way we see the Trump sons through their slaughtered African beasts.
And still, we don't see Nathan that well. In a sexcore novel with a protagonist named Eve, it might help to finish "Nathan" with a Zuckerman—after Philip Roth's sex-crazed narrator—instead of a Gallagher, even though Gallagher does suggest the bland blue of the Zuckerberg Family Office. When I was reading Acts of Service, my mind returned not to one of Zuckerman's females, but to David Kepesh's Consuela Castillo of The Dying Animal, with its echt Modigliani book cover. But as the long-suffering consumer of Roth's erotic world hopefully ends up learning, his side broads were never as real as Eve Cook. The master prose writer preferred his latest duchess painted, up on the wall, or at least blotted, smudged, in the pages of his books. While Consuelo will lose her magnificent breasts—two reasons Professor Kepesh favored her matriculation in the first place—the only thing Eve might lose, if she keeps sleeping with Nathan for the "mad thickness" of his biocock, is a Trump-era political commitment or two. When we began, it was with Eve's faceless nude body, but near the end we will see Nathan's—likewise enhanced—in one of Olivia's canvases. "She had concealed his face in all the paintings, which only increased their beauty and mystery." Nathan, like Irigaray's Woman, existed only for a man to know his fellow man. At the end he's blurred out, fanged pornographer Father behind barely legal thigh.
Or, Shelia Heti again: "Love is radical because it laughs at all the dramas, especially the drama of winning." With Nathan, Eve could keep pouring lattes. She never has to win, because that's a man's job. She can lament the loss of her heterosexual future by, ironically, keeping prelapsarian time with Nathan—that is, fuck out of time. Contrast this with Lisa Halliday's canned portrait of Roth in 2018's Asymmetry. The atrociously named Ezra Blazer wears "an extremely sensible, analog, waterproof watch." Nathan Gallagher, on the other hand, wears a simple, elegant black watch—just like Richard Gere's playboy Will Keane in Autumn in New York—and Nathan takes it off to make love, just like he'll take off his condoms: "His watch was on the side table where it always rested while he looked at me." In a novel filled with sparse and generous details, this is one of Fishman's finest. Since the invention of sexuality, since around the time of Freud's remark that there are always four beings in the room during sex, there's an entire pharamcopornographic political ecology working unemotional overtime to convince us sex is on the clock. Maybe it is too late for sex, a conclusion Sam Lipsyte pulls out in a recent robot sex feature for Harper's. Maybe it's too late for sex, just like it's too late for sea levels to detumesce. The Novel, as always—especially a novel as secure in its insecurity as Acts of Service—is the art power arguing otherwise. If only, like the Novel promises, we could waste time like this forever. But we're told this kind of self-love goes away with age, or at least you don't need to necessarily fuck strangers anymore to find it. You learn to love your partner, your podcasts, your paunch. That's why sex perduring is such a fertile (and commercially lucrative?) space for fiction. Here, for Fishman's Eve—as when Zuckerman would rather lose his heart courageously than his hard-on with a whimper—sex becomes the self-care of massaging the reptile out from between your all-too-human toes.
...I knew that the hour in which sex occurred was the least superficial thing: For that hour, at least, I was absolutely real and present, capable of feeling, intuition, care, vulnerability. Why couldn't I feel like that with the help of a little solitary tool, like meditation or exercise? Before I met Olivia and Nathan, I had imagined that I could—that all I needed to do was post my pictures online to satisfy myself and get free.
Finally, who is this novel's addressee? I found myself rereading Marie Calloway's what purpose did I serve in your life?, a proto-sexcore work, and this remark from one of the protagonist's friends struck me anew: "I remember that you said that one day you want to write a story that's completely incomprehensible to men." Fishman exposes similar motivations in the novel's epigraph, lines from Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion, worth quoting in full:
He had said, "You won't write a book about me." But I haven't written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words—words he will probably never read; they are not intended for him—the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.
"Speaking of Nino I felt authorized to talk about myself." This is Lenù, Ferrante's narrator of the Neapolitan Novels (here, in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay), describing the man she has known forever, the boy she will leave her boring marriage for. Earlier, in My Brilliant Friend, she describes him the way Eve might describe Nathan, or how sentimental Nathan might describe Eve: "how handsome he was, how languid, and yet how much I disliked his languor." Before Lenù and Nino finally hook up, they talk about that other Eve:
We had a single long exchange, focused entirely on my writing. He spoke about it immediately, upon arriving, with precision and acuteness... he asked: for you, the woman, in the Biblical story, is no different from the man, is the man himself? Yes, I said. Eve can't, doesn't know how, doesn't have the material to be Eve outside of Adam. Her evil and her good are evil and good according to Adam. Eve is Adam as a woman. And the divine work was so successful that she herself, in herself, doesn't know what she is, she has pliable features, she doesn't possess her own language, she doesn't have a spirit or a logic of her own, she loses her shape easily. A terrible condition, Nino commented... then he went off to the library.
I have always believed—I have educated myself to believe—that David cared for Consuela, that Christian cared for Anastasia; and I believe now that Nathan cared for Eve. Acts of Service doesn't deny us any of that and gives us something greater: Eve addresses Eve in just the way we expect Adam to address himself. It's a rare female character who doesn't have all the answers, whereas for male characters private lands of indecision are federally supported. It is this, and not even all the love, making this novel radical. For that kind of commodity death to occur, the book argues, we must believe, like Foucault—sounding like the tagline of a Michael Douglas passion play—that sex is worth dying for. As long as Woman can be born again.
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