Now this is a story! I’d reserved a copy of Melissa Broder’s book The Pisces at the library, but since it wasn’t immediately available, I opted to start with her most recent release, Death Valley. I wasn’t impressed, but The Pisces came so highly recommended that I was still looking forward to reading it. I was not disappointed.
First, many people did not like this book. After I finished I perused the reviews and found that people hated the MC, who by her own admission is a completely fucked up asshole, and therefore decided to give the book one star. This boggles my mind. The purpose of fiction is to pull you into a story and allow you to think, feel, and experience the world through a different lens. If you hated the main character of the book, it’s because the author was SUCCESSFUL at making you feel things about them. Like, what? Some of the best books I’ve ever read were about terrible people.
Anyway, yes, Lucy – the main character – is a dick. She’s neurotic, selfish, and terrible at relationships. She’s also an academic (natch) and has been working on her thesis about Sappho for over a decade. The book starts with her pretending to break up with her longtime boyfriend, just to ‘shake things up’ a little, and is dismayed when he agrees it’s a good idea. She freaks out, breaks his nose, and then goes to California to stay at her sister’s glamorous Venice Beach house to get away. Whilst in L.A., she joins a therapy group for women who don’t know how to love (or be loved) and who all manifest this in various self-destructive ways (which I found highly entertaining).
Lucy forms a bond with her sister’s dog, a creature in whom she begins to see unconditional love. She finds joy in nurturing and being nurtured, but this relationship is quickly sabotaged by the discovery of a hot guy out for a swim one night when she walks down to the beach. The two of them have an instant chemistry, and Lucy is sucked into a powerful, erotic relationship with what turns out to be… a merman. Yes. That’s right. A merman. Half sexy human, half sexy…fish.
Now, look. This could have gone badly. Erotic fiction featuring mythical sea creatures isn’t exactly the kind of thing I seek out, but I love magical realism, and I’m down for almost anything as long as it’s done well. And it is! It’s a testament to Broder as a writer that such an absurd conceit doesn’t detract from the novel’s underlying messages and themes. The relationship that forms between Lucy and her handsome fish-man is at once an epiphany and an escape from the harsh reality of Lucy’s deficiencies, leading her to increasingly ignore her sister’s dog and withdraw further from any healthy connections she has with other people.
Broder’s prose is quintessentially Millennial, her characters are self-aware even as they flail and drown in their own dysfunction. Her descriptions of sex (and other bodily functions) are unapologetically frank, riddled with self-depreciation, and ridiculously graphic – none of which is a negative, in my personal opinion.
Ultimately, after a heart-wrenching climax, Lucy is presented with a choice about how to proceed with her life…and love. She has to choose whether to pursue the idea of love that leads to her destruction, or to embrace the un-fun, unsexy, day-to-day relationships that, while void of ecstatic orgasms and the promise of being possessed, are where her true humanity lies.