Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

I had been going around for years trying to figure out what sex meant to other people...

Eve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship—one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her.

As each act of their affair unfolds across a cold and glittering New York, Eve is forced to confront the questions that most consume her: What do we bring to sex? What does it reveal of ourselves, and one another? And how do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want?

In the way only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, Lillian Fishman’s riveting debut is bold, unabashed, and required reading of the most pleasurable sort.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Queer, Literary Fiction, LGBT, Romance, Lesbian

228 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2022

About the author

Lillian Fishman was born in 1994 and lives in New York. She received her MFA from NYU, where she was a Jill Davis Fellow.

Reviews

[Danika at The Lesbrary · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a frustrating reading experience.

The main problem I had was that the questions it raised were ones I’m invested in, and conversations I want to see more of in literature. But while there were glimmers of insight and memorable lines, those didn’t feel worth reading a whole novel about two women idolizing this insufferable guy.

This is one of those books that leaves me feeling like I must be missing something. It feels like this is a novel that has something to say about sex and gender and queerness, but I could not tell you what it is. That sexual desire doesn’t always align with politics? Well, sure. That gender norms are easy to fall into? Can’t argue with that. That we can find pleasure even in unhealthy relationships? Yep.

I just wanted something more, and I kept waiting for it to end in a way that brought meaning to the experience, but it felt more like it fizzled out.

Full review at the Lesbrary.

[emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am never happier than when i feel special.

https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...

i’m a longstanding opponent of the not like other girls trope (i’m on the record since like 2015, which means this hatred significantly outlives most of my opinions, relationships, and sweaters), but i do like to be unlike other people. i turn the average meal-to-dessert ratio on its head. i stan dunkin over starbucks. i am in the midst of a lifelong quest to have the single most disturbing sleep schedule i can.

and of course, above all, i am an appreciator of a good unpopular opinion.

however.

i don’t think my opinion of this book should be unique.

this book has a devastating 3.19, and this is in spite of being complete perfection from beginning to end.

i picked up a library ebook of this, and while several of my very favorites in the world loved this book, i kinda expected to 3.5 it and move on into my resting state of complete forgetting as soon as possible.

instead, i found myself highlighting swaths of text, almost buzzing with that oh my god is this is a five star this might be a five star feeling, resonating with the emotions depicted and stunned by how lovely and clear the writing was.

and then i finished it, bought a copy, and reread and annotated it barely a week after reading it for the first time.

it’s really an easy five star, filled with taboo topics and fascinating characters and revealing dynamics. it’s about love and sex, gender and power, and how to find yourself or even know what that would look like. it’s about searching for happiness and meaning while being unable to admit that’s what you’re doing.

it’s everything that i think about the most.

bottom line: read it!!!

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reread update

nothing says five star read like rereading after a week

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pre-review

never happier than when i love a book everyone hates :)

review to come / 4.5 or 5 stars

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tbr review

the best thing that can possibly happen to a person is when they get very into a subgenre that is also simultaneously the single most trendy and common subgenre there is.

i am going to live forever

[kasey · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book is everything i dislike about the "vaguely depressed women in their twenties" subgenre of literary fiction (normal people, my year of rest and relaxation, etc).

it's framed as a daring, subversive, feminist novel about sexuality. at what point did completely submitting to heterosexual gender roles become subversive? on some level i am partly to blame for this negative review (i have read one too many novels about young women involving themselves in relationships with older men and i know they annoy me more often than not) but this one is uniquely bad.

it's marketed as a "queer" novel, and eve IS bisexual (though she seems to identify as a lesbian at the beginning and a lot of the rest of the novel is her trying to self-justify her attraction to a man and talking about how awful it is and how ashamed she feels, which is bizarre considering that very few people are ever shamed for being heterosexual and pretty much all gay people have been judged for it at some point). but despite being bi, eve spends most of the novel 1) engaging in heterosexual sex that plays into stereotypes of a dominant, powerful man and a submissive woman who is only valued for her beauty, then acting as if this kind of objectification is empowering somehow because she chose it, and 2) going on page-long tangents reflecting on her thoughts on romance and sexuality through an extremely heterosexual lens. at one point she says "women were valuable only until their bodies expired, women who gave themselves only to each other relinquished that value entirely." which is the most sexist way to ever look at relationships, assuming both that women's only value lies in beauty and that women can't find each other beautiful? genuinely cannot comprehend how a queer women seems to think women's attraction to other women is somehow less real than men's attraction to women.

and this isn't a one off line. the whole book is full of eve's reflections on the fundamental differences between men and women, and how that makes gay relationships "easier" (in what world?) because the people "have things in common" (as if the only thing people can have in common is gender, as if men and women can't have things in common). she talks about how there will be something missing in her life if she doesn't have sexual experiences with men because who else would appreciate her body and her femininity in the same way (which is both sexist and deeply transphobic). it is FINE to be attracted to men but portraying it as something necessarily and fundamental to womanhood is actually deeply harmful especially for a book marketed as queer.

for a book about queerness and womanhood, the whole thing is obsessed with men. olivia, the woman involved in a threesome with eve and the central male character, has no relationship with eve and only cares about/obsesses over the man, nathan. eve's girlfriend, romi, is given zero depth beyond being the "perfect girlfriend," which the author attempts to justify by having romi criticize eve for seeing her as too perfect when they break up. well, too little too late. even eve, despite being the protagonist, is defined only by her sexuality and has no other interests in goals. so this book can't even claim to be an analysis of her as a person, because it's only bothered with her thoughts on sexuality and on men.

we didn't need another book about a queer woman having sex with an older man. we definitely didn't need to paint it as subversive. i don't know where this whole narrative that being gay is completely normalized and being straight is the real subversive thing comes from, but it certainly isn't true. and i'd much rather read a book about someone struggling with same-gender attraction than another woman who has angst over the fact that having sex with men doesn't align with her political views but she wants to do it anyway. i don't think these people exist in real life. i definitely take issue with the fact that these kinds of novels are portrayed as "relatable" for all women.

[elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

“against all my better rationales, my life recognized sex.”

lillian fishman’s debut does not feel like a debut. with sharp writing that feels alive, acts of service examines themes of sexuality, consent, and power through the eyes of eve, a woman in her twenties, against the glittering backdrop of new york city.

eve, the protagonist, lives with her girlfriend, romi. they live a somewhat mundane life. one day, after posting nudes online, she is contacted by a woman named olivia, who proposes that eve sleeps with her and nathan, her boss who she happens to be involved with.

there isn’t much to say about the plot, because much of the book is eve’s rumination and introspection. eve is extremely self aware and darkly critical, which allows for a plethora of passages of baroque self reflection. however, this is not to say that a single moment in this book was dull. every single line in this book felt biting and razor-edged.

the plot itself is organized chaos: every character is unlikeable and morally gray and toxic in their own way, and every relationship is underlined with degrees of unequal power dynamics and passivity.

fishman paints a rich and complex portrait of sexuality in the twenty-first century and its adjacent concepts of power and agency and how we are perceived by others. it cleverly explores sex and sexuality in a way that is not only addictive to read, but also self-contained and philosophical. does sexual desire and freedom come hand in hand with morality and politics? to what extent does the patriarchy and gender roles influence our intrinsic thoughts regarding love and sex?

what i loved the most was fishman’s ability to discern layers in what usually feels like one vast notion. in acts of service, all relationships are nuanced as she is able to pull apart and differentiate love, sexual desire, and romance, which often are all grouped into one sentiment. love is not always romantic, and power dynamics within relationships are not always solidified or black and white.

acts of service is a brilliant, introspective novel, and i enjoyed every second of it.

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

holy shit

you guys are going to scream when this comes out. it's SO fucking good.

thank you so much to hogarth books for the gift!

[idiomatic · Rating 2 out of 5]

EDITED: i don't like to evaluate books above the text but this interview with the author makes it really clear that all of the aspects i saw as nuanced and sharp in my original review were instead a product of either an extremely baby brained red scare-esque postfeminism or, perhaps optimistically?, the author taking craven sales advice on how to het up the book. i am leaving the review up below for now but i don't think any author that writes a book where the heroine gets wet over the fact that a wall street guy's elevator goes direct to his penthouse and then uses words like "hero" and "love" to describe that relationship is writing at the level of higher thought i ascribed to her. hope she gets there someday! all the best.

-
ORIGINAL REVIEW: this is so frustrating! of course it's done pretty well for itself - it has the it factor that good litfic has, that simply can’t be faked or polished no matter how prestigious the mfa (though make no mistake the mfa is prestigious and the polish is significant - irl lol at seeing jonathan safran foer namechecked in the acks).

the thing that makes this book stand apart to ME is it handles with clarity and candor a facet of the bisexual* experience that i’ve wanted to see made explicit in the conversation for ages, which is how overtly seductive it is to fuck men, and to specifically playact the role of ‘hot girl on a man’s arm’, even and especially when you know you don't have to be doing this shit. the corollary of being seen as just a body is to be unknowable beyond the body, and to become invulnerable knowing your thoughts are inaccessible (albeit by someone who has no real desire to access them). the more overtly grade-a patriarchal, the more mad men, the more ‘you should know better’, the more potent the potential erotic angle. boring obligatory #notallmen disclaimer, obvi, but specifically to be a smart queer woman with a sense of self sitting across from a wall street dickhead who's picking up the check is to face god and walk backwards into hell.

and the book has a sharp grasp on those seductions, at first - that which is easy is seductive, in the sense of being both the lazy option and the luxurious one. luxury is cumulative; it accrues where the money already is, where the power already is. it is pleasurable to abdicate responsibility - to both whatever social ethics you feel yourself beholden and to the self in general - to walk through a gilded door. “women are more complicated” is the refrain of the bisexual coward with a straight boyfriend, but it’s also true in the sense that on a date with a man you can let the dominant hetero narrative of your choosing take the reins and forget yourself, along with the person seated across from you, in it - you can voluntarily strip away your own personhood and the personhood of the guy at the table and simply let the dominant social forces of gender and sexuality jaeger you around. is this good? no, but it is undeniably hot girl shit to sit at a fancy restaurant being objectified by a man and feeling the self willingly - or, as willingly as is possible for this - dissolve. hot girls, we have problems too, etc.

and/but - the corollary of “women are more complicated” means that the m/f/f threesome experience is easily flung out of that space of the dissolved self when the women look at each other and consider each other. the legacy of art by and about gay women is about looking at each other and the destabilizing romantic/erotic force of seeing and being seen (portrait of a lady on fire voice: regardez) (that one very twitter famous piece of art voice: me looking at her looking at me). not every f/f OR m/f dynamic is identical, but the funhouse mirror of the self that opens up between women is directly at odds with the dissolution of self and ethics i just described. and this is a very long prelude to saying: that is how this book opens up, and the promise it makes to its readers. a beautiful girl posts her nudes, gets honeytrapped by a girl who is actually messaging on behalf of her overconfident boyfriend… tale as old as tinder. eve is drawn in by olivia’s prickliness and deceptively demure exterior; the sex is competitive and distant between them, whereas it is easy with the entitled boyfriend, nathan, precisely because of the entitlement. the central emotional tension is about how eve is going to bridge that gap with olivia, and then… she doesn’t. by the end there's an overarching premise that the good sex with nathan is enough to be the subject of the book's plot and eve's sexual journey, which even aside 'is this a coherent argument from open to close' (no) makes for a wobbly ass three-legged stool of a threesome dynamic. the last act is a contrived, banal conversation with the reader, launched from a laughably inane narrative springboard, about... feminism? complicity? a bunch of mushmouthed talking points and zero satisfying interpersonal moments. absolute deflating balloon fart noise of a last two chapters. if the book wasn’t so concise i’d’ve docked another star for it. [ED NOTE: The author made it clear that the extended fart noise was the only bit reflective of her 'intentions' for the book, meaning to read this book at higher level intellectual or queer conversation, or to expect narrative intention from it is actually to read against its text. I docked two.]

*there’s a line where eve** refers to herself as a political lesbian which chafed and continues to chafe. this is a bisexual book, in subject (fucking and desiring a man and a woman, at the same time, differently) and in its conversations and references. eve is sufficiently engaged in the contemporary queer scene that i simply don’t buy her as an adult walking around with the lesbian label, even if she’s not generally fucking men at the beginning. literally it's fine to be a bisexual who has put men on a temporary to permanent pause. the label is not an obligation to fuck both sexes equally all the time. i feel like eve as a narrator, specifically a modern queer narrator, would be at home inside of this; OR if not, she is positioned to delve into a level of linguistic infighting inside the modern queer scene that the book isn’t interested in. which… it might have balanced the book some to have more of those conversations! the author is queer, the lived experience of queerness is convincing, and drawing more contrasting material from that well might have steered the course away from that fucking clown show of a denouement, if only because it’d mean there were more things to react to in the world.

**lmao! the book is very explicitly in conversation with eve babitz, to the point where her name is invoked - i found this funny and touching (the eve babitz girlies are breaking big!! signed, an eve babitz girlie) and also a little bit pathetic given the central flaw i’m discussing. don’t honor eve babitz by dropping her name. honor her by having a threesome for the story, falling in love with a GIRL for REAL, and asking her if she wants to run away to MEXICO. COWARD!

arguably the throughline of complicity/equivalence between eve and nathan would have hit slightly harder if eve’s personality was worse in a more specific way, but though i have no doubt that eve will get clocked as an Unlikable Female Character for being lazy, slutty, and unfaithful (which, i mean, fair enough) she’s not a true menace the way i.e. the narrator of our year of rest & relaxation is. invoked because this book is in convo with year of rest & relaxation for sure - it is, if nothing else, designed to be carried around in the same purses, jangling around next to the same dior lip gloss. but eve’s central sin (ha ha ha) is passivity more than anything else, and i feel like a book interested in discussing (1) the sexual oasis of false power an allegedly emancipated hot girl can find inside the male gaze (2) the concerns of power and control between women, and how gay women can develop a sort of overcompensatory conscience to keep them from becoming ‘like men’ in their pursuit of other women - might go a little harder on what it means for the heroine to see herself in this wall street shithead guy. possibly the last act feels weak and cowardly because the author was genuinely fearful of (2), to a degree that ends up neutralizing both eve and nathan as characters and as literary projects (to say nothing of leaving poor olivia at the narrative door).

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

UN CORPO CHIAMATO DESIDERIO


Eve Babitz ventenne e Marcel Duchamp giocano a scacchi. Foto di Julian Wasser definita dallo Smithsonian Archives of American Art “tra le immagini documentarie chiave dell'arte moderna americana”.

Lei, Eve, l’io narrante – il che induce a credere si tratti di storia autobiografica, il memoir impera, ma anche no, centopercento finzione – si definisce queer e ha una fidanzata che si chiama Romie fa la pediatra: hanno un buon rapporto, basato su amore e attrazione, ma anche libertà, ciascuna lascia all’altra tre o quattro sere a settimana libera di spaziare altrove (fare altro, vedere altri…)
All’inizio del romanzo Eve posta online, in forma anonima, degli autoscatti di nudo integrale, e tra i vari commenti che riceve seleziona quello di Olivia.
Vivono entrambe a New York, così, si incontrano la sera dopo: ma Olivia non vuole fare sesso con Eve – o meglio, non vuole farlo subito, adesso: per il momento quello che vuole è farle conoscere il suo magnifico amante Nathan, molto chiaramente coinvolgerla in una storia a tre.
Eve tentenna, ma solo un attimo, è troppo curiosa, il desiderio è forte, per Olivia, e molto probabilmente anche per l’ancora sconosciuto Nathan.


Diego Velázquez: Venere allo specchio (Venere Rokeby).

Lillian Fisher imbastisce una storia che potrebbe far pensare alle variazioni di grigio, nero e quant’altro: cammina sul filo del porno, ma riesce a tenersene fuori, non sconfina mai, anche se le threesome sono una categoria dei siti porno che generalmente a noi maschietti piace molto. FFM, dove la effe sta per female/femmina, e la m per male/maschio: quindi donna+donna+uomo. Il triangolo sì, l’ho sempre considerato. A cominciare dalla divina Patty e la sua pazza idea. L’unica occasione che avremo di vedere il paradiso, direbbe Eve Babitz (qui citata). Estasi e subbuglio.


Henry Matisse: la danza.

È un mondo che non è immediato riconoscere. Che ha una valenza molto attuale. Contemporanea. La fluidità del genere sessuale. L’esplorazione del corpo, altrui ma soprattutto del proprio. L’esplorazione del desiderio, altrui ma soprattutto del proprio.
Come se il corpo, con il propellente del sesso, fosse una navicella spaziale che ci permette di esplorare nuove galassie. Uno strumento per andare alla scoperta, verso la conoscenza di altri corpi umani, e quindi di altre anime.
È la rivoluzione sessuale che Reich tanto auspicava? Non saprei. Ma di sicuro appare come un passo, e anche qualcuno di più, in quella direzione. Evviva. Alleluja.


Il fauno Barberini.

Hanno più o meno trent’anni, Nathan è il maggiore e il più ricco fra loro tre, datore di lavoro di Olivia. Deve essere un amico di Sting o seguire la stessa pratica tantrica, perché anche lui, come il musicista, è capace di performance sessuali che durano ore: se ricordo bene l’ex Police si fermava a cinque (prima di rivelare che era una divertente bufala inventata da lui stesso), Nathan arriva anche a otto, con grande ammirazione e soprattutto smisurata invidia di tutti noi maschietti.
Nathan esprime una teoria affascinante: la gente è noiosa, prevedibile, banale; ma anche quelli che vivono di (inconsapevoli) citazioni (leggi: parole e pensiero altrui), quando si entra nella sfera sessuale sono perlopiù analfabeti, “vergini”, terreni da esplorare con curiosità, piante non ancora modellate dal contesto sociale. E come se la vera verità, quella più profonda, fosse raggiungibile esclusivamente attraverso il sesso che rappresenta l’autentica natura di ciascuno.


Constantin Brancusi: Principessa X (1915-6).

Man mano che le pagine scorrono sembra quasi che Eve stia percorrendo al contrario il suo cammino di liberazione: cresciuta in una famiglia tradizionale, con un padre che fatica ad accettare l’omosessualità della figlia, si è “aperta” al femminismo e allo spirito queer, alla sessualità liquida, alle identità non binarie. L’incontro con Nathan sembra sospingerla indietro verso quello che appare come un terreno di normalizzazione, l’eterosessualità.
Ma Lillian Fishman non è così banale e tiene in serbo un finale coi fiocchi.
E forse perché l’argomento è in più modi incandescente, la formazione filosofica della Fishman traspare in più punti dove sembra di leggere un romanzo illuminista, come se Lillian Fishman avesse avuto bisogno di “raffreddare” la materia del suo racconto, esaminarla con distanza.
Un bel libro che mi sembra anche importante.


Louise Bourgeois: Nature Study (1996).

[Anna Avian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another reviewer wrote "For a book about queerness and womanhood, the whole thing is obsessed with men." and I totally agree.
I lost interest in the story halfway through. The dynamics between the three MC's never changed, their relationship wasn't really going anywhere. The main thing that was missing for me was depth to their conversations. I couldn't understand why these two women would obsess so much over such a blatantly boring and insufferable man. I never found out what was this rare and invaluable experience that he was able to give them either.

[Kate H · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank you Hogarth Press and Penguin Random House for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Acts of service is a privileged white perspective that only conservative/sheltered/sex-negative people think is daring or bold, but in reality it’s the same old story of a poor little rich girl being lost and bored in life, so she explores her sexuality. It’s told through a distant lens that removes the narrator (Eve) and the reader from how trivial and dull her life is. Nobody needs to read another story about sex from a white, cis perspective. (I was even tempted to add 'straight' in there, too, because most of the sex scenes are between a man and a woman but, Eve is not straight so that would be dishonest.) This is such a white feminism book that's meant for white feminists.

This book lacked spice and I found the characters insufferable.

[james · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Why do you always thank Nathan? I asked. Why do you always say, Thank you, thank you, thank you?
What else can I say? she said. Aren't you grateful?"

reading count: 5 (03/2024)



welcome to 202-Queer 🌈✨, the year where i only read queer books and finally have fun 🌈✨

50 in February: 16/50 ... yes, i did read it for a third time. idk and idc. good news though! i also ordered a physical copy so i'll probably read it a fourth time ❤️


review after 2nd read:

yes, i did immediately reread it after finishing it. on the same day. back to back. without breaks.


you all are so wrong about this. 3 star average rating? be serious.


they were so MESSY, your honor, i LOVE THEM. i'm obsessed with all of them. they're just so goddamn weird. their entire relationship with sex and other people just so fucked up.

i don't even know how to describe what exactly i loved about this but that's just exactly the kind of book i usually gravitate towards. it's a bit too relatable in a vague fucked up sense.


if you liked Normal People or Luster you might like this one too. if you don't -... well, your loss.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This debut novel comes with heavy endorsements from the likes of Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sheila Heti, Raven Leilani, and David Lipsky, but I already see how the provocative text will divide opinion, as everyone in here is, you know, PROBLEMATIC, and rattling the cage of politically correct feminism is the whole point of the story. Our protagonist and narrator Eve identifies as a lesbian, she is an a serious relationship with a doctor, but starts an affair with another woman named Olivia plus Olivia's lover and boss, Nathan. Moral questions regarding infidelity, power imbalances, female solidarity, dependence, manipulation, jealousy and pleasure arise, and while the book mainly consist of explicit sex scenes, there is always the question of acceptability/moral principle vs. desire lurking in the background.

Eve is drifting through life, exploring her sexuality; she constantly ponders where the line is between Nathan's manipulations and her desires she wouldn't dare to address without his prompting. And then there's her relationship to the women around her: She is cheating on her girlfriend, and she is jealous and sometimes resentful towards Olivia while also worrying about her because she could be fired or blackmailed as she upholds an inappropriate relationship with her boss Nathan. Eve is vain and wants to be admired and desired - does this make her a bad queer person, a bad feminist? What does agency mean in the context of her sexual endeavors with Olivia and Nathan?

This is a puzzling, gritty book that challenges readers, as what happens here is hard to categorize in terms of wokism - which is not per se a statment against woke politics; rather, it pushes the conversation forward by debating the messiness of sexual desire. It's pretty outrageous that every female debut nowadays gets compared to Sally Rooney, especially in this case: Beautiful World, Where Are You has some interesting sex scenes involving questions of consent, while in Acts of Service, Nathan and Eve question whether what Rooney portrays is the best way to negotiate consent, and there will be people who dismiss Fishman's book for these conversations alone.

Talking about conversations, there is A LOT of dialogue in here; it's almost like the sex scenes are interspersed with philosophical ruminations about sex and the nature of desire, and how that desire which evolves from the subconscious can be reconciled with the conscious and the ego.

An intriguing debut, and I'm looking forward to the discussions it will undboubtedly provoke.

[Books with Brittany]

Hated this

[BookOfCinz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of teeth… zero bite

If this book was a show- it would be Girls, if this book was a person it would be Lena Dunham. The girls that get it, get it, the girls that don't don't

This read like a very subpar first draft of My Year Of Rest and Relaxation if I am being honest. In Acts of Service we meet a Eve, twentysomething New Yorker who works as a barista until she decides to get a “real job” or call her father to beg for her inheritance. Eve is in a long-time relationship with her girlfriend. One night out of boredom Eve decides to upload her nudes to a website where Olivia messages on the nudes asking her to meet with her. Out of curiosity and in search for some excitement she meets up with Olivia who begs her to meet with Nathan so they can have a threesome. Excitement Eve wants, that she gets as she tries to understand the dynamics between Nathan and Oliva and how her being with them may change that.

Dubbed, “might be the most thought-provoking book you read all year…” it s a very big claim because I had a lot more questions than thoughts. The book rambles on, Eve becomes obsessed with Nathan, honestly, this is basically a second draft of Fifty Shades of Grey if we all are being honest and if you think otherwise you are lying to yourself.

The writer tries so hard to make this more than what it is- a very poorly written book that tries to make you think about sex, power and sexuality. I really wish the editors went back to the drawing board with this one because a very strong re-write and this may have been good.

[emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

to everyone who said that this was fifty shades of grey meets sally rooney, you were correct. it did not work for me, but i can appreciate the conversations it will begin about sex, gender and queerness for some of its audience.

from my perspective, this novel adds nothing to what i do not already know - we find both desire and pleasure in unhealthy relationships and that we do occasionally succumb to gender norms regardless of how headstrong we are. the points weren’t groundbreaking nor remarkable to me, and so, for me, it fell flat. i needed a reason to be invested in this and there was nothing. it almost felt empty despite the amount of action throughout.

two psa’s before i go:

1. to all authors out there, stop the omission of speech marks in your work in favour for what you think is quirkiness. it is annoying. you are not doing what you think you are doing.

2. regardless of how messy and flawed you want your characters to be, do not call them a political lesbian if they both desire and willingly want and do engage in sex with a man or men. they are not a lesbian. you know this. it is okay to label them as bisexual or pansexual with a preference for women. sincerely, a lesbian with a severe lack of patience for this.

[Uzma Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I REALLY really liked this one. Not just for the reasons that you would think okay!! How dare you accuse me!! I have more depth to me than just… that!! What!!

Okay fine I did partly like it for the reasons that you would think.

Allow me to break it down for you: Eve posts some nudes online, woman finds her profile and asks to meet, Eve becomes a third for said woman and the guy she’s sucking. Even though our main character originally went into this whole thing being interested in the woman, she ends up finding herself a lot more pleased when submitting to the man. Enter questions of inherent power dynamics between men and women, morality regarding certain kinks, the influence of gender in sexuality, etc. A lot more shit happens in this that makes the book feel like a steaming pot of gossip that you probably shouldn’t be reading. So sorry… I was very intrigued.

One thing I love about Acts of Service is that it tackles real ideas about sexuality very seriously. In this s o c i e t y (dare I say), sex is still really taboo, so that makes conversations about its effects in our human interactions pretty difficult. But I honestly think these effects are important to discuss, and Lillian Fishman opens the door to a bit of that dialogue over power and desire. Even though we might be into certain things, there are real world implications for it, and this book just kinda got me thinking, which is something I wasn’t really expecting it to do. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

[Laith · Rating 1 out of 5]

i dont usually read books that are so focused on sexuality but I had heard good things about this one. it did not live up to the hype.

this book was the same kind of insufferable as 'conversations with friends'. i can honestly say I hate the small genre of these kinds of books that seem to be emerging; claiming to focus on 'starting conversations about sexuality' but not ever really saying anything of note, and revolving entirely on hypocritical women who we are expected to perceive as intelligent despite the fact that they choose to worship a truly disgusting man and consistently make decisions that I can only describe as unfathomable.

this book was very clearly written for 20 something white women who wish they were something they are not. i see the appeal, but it honestly just wasn't for me.

[chloe · Rating 1 out of 5]

i'm gonna admit... i did not retain 95% of this because i was so bored

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

unlikeable sexy queer characters… intellectual discussions of morality and sex…feminism and desire…screaming

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Every now and then I have an experience with a book that is totally singular. When this happens and then I stare at the empty box where I am supposed to write a review, I don't really know what to say. Everything that happened between me and this book will not happen to anyone else who reads it. And every time this happens I think, "Well here is a useless Goodreads review," and then everyone ends up really liking that particular review. It's an odd phenomenon. I never know when it will happen. I certainly wasn't expecting it here.

So many people are going to hate this book and everyone in it and I can see why they would think that. Almost everything that happens is very uncomfortable, from the very beginning when Eve posts nudes online while her girlfriend is in the other room. You will think these are bad and likely unrealistic choices. Maybe you will think that Eve and the people she becomes entangled with, Nathan and Olivia, don't act like real people. I get that. Nathan in particular feels impossible. And yet, the thing is, I know him. Years ago I had a not-quite-relationship with someone who is so much like Nathan in almost every way that it was absolutely eerie to read this book. It felt like Fishman had spied on us.

I don't tell many people about this man. The things that happened between us are difficult to explain and even more difficult to justify. While it was happening and for all the years since then I have never known how to feel. I feel grateful and I feel grossed out, almost in equal measure. There are all these things I can point to that make the power dynamic suspect, so many things about the ways he did things that were not coercive and yet they weren't entirely not. This man saw many other women, and I knew this, and so did they, and yet everyone kept coming back and I totally understood because I did, too. How to explain everything between us? It is hard to do, except now I can just tell someone to read this book, change a few of the personal details, and it is him. This impossible character.

Outside of the bizarre, uncanny experience of meeting this person again on the page, I found so much of what Fishman writes about here relatable and real. It is a small miracle to have this and LITTLE RABBIT out in such short proximity. They are both about the strange quandary of being a queer woman who sleeps with cis men. There is often this desire to be above it, to no longer need them--in fact this is where Eve is at the beginning of the book--and it can definitely feel in the queer community that you are more accepted when you don't sleep with cis men. And there are so many other reasons not to, including how dangerous they can be. But then again, that danger can also be an attraction, and what do you do when you are attracted to what you find horrible? What does it mean when you find new parts of yourself through that kind of relationship? Is it destructive or creative? Is it being held captive or is it growing?

Fishman writes so well about all of this that it makes me mad. You shouldn't be allowed to be this wise in your 20's. She captures such perfect tension. Her sex writing, in particular, is sexy and disturbing, just as it should be given the circumstances. Just when you think you have these people figured out, she changes the angle and you see something new. It is never going to be simple.

The only thing about this book that didn't feel like it was written for (or about?) me was Eve's relationship with her father and money, the way she has sought out this purposely aimless independence because of her upper-class upbringing. All the characters here have a similar status, it is almost necessary because if they had anything real to worry about, they wouldn't have the time and the space to do everything they do.

At some point you know this has to take a turn, and it does. The final third starts to address more directly many of the questions Eve has asked herself this whole time. But when she worried about whether the relationship dynamics were harmful to Olivia, she often saw for herself exactly how things played out, exactly how Olivia exerted and lost control. She limits her view of Nathan and Olivia, not asking herself how people like this exist in the real world, that eventually the real world has to come crashing in. It feels heavy and sudden, but it also feels inevitable. Of course we ended up here, how could we not? It is a bit ambiguous, which will only annoy people who already hate Nathan, but it is just how Eve would see it and that ambiguity I don't think detracts from what the book is trying to do. The ways feminism can be messy and gray and unclear, the ways it doesn't give you the ability to have a single answer to every question is part of what Fishman is grappling with here. The idea that you will always be able to move through a situation with complicated dynamics and conflicting desires by just following some feminist north star is simply not the case and that is exactly the spot where we spend basically the whole novel.

I listened to this on audio, it had a reader I've enjoyed before and she was a good fit for this one. I listened to it obsessively, I wanted to read this book every minute of the day. It is, as you'd guess from the cover, not the kind of book you can listen to in polite company.

If the gray areas around sex, power, and consent are difficult for you, then this book will be difficult for you because that is its entire deal.

I admit the thing that most disturbs me from reading this book is the idea that maybe Nathan is based on a real person and not someone that Fishman just invented to serve her purposes. That maybe there is more than one of him out there.

[Alwynne · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

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 quite possible I just wasn’t the right fit for this one.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Europa Editions for an ARC

[HB. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rape cw //

I think a lot of this went over my head and the direct mockery of being queer felt deeply confusing. "she thought she would be telling a queer story — by the end, it became a book about heterosexuality. " should've been a sign that I would hate this book, but I really do like the style of her writing and was apparently invested enough to finish it. There were some ideas that I thought could've been interesting to think about, but I don't understand how all of them were distilled to this idea that Nathan was somehow the most important part of them all? A rich as hell white cis straight man who doesn't believe in safe words and is so sure he can read women during sex he thinks it's funny when women express how uncomfortable they feel around him being both the problem and somehow the answer made no sense to me.

“But it comes from within, it’s Eve’s own journey, and that’s what’s feminist about it.” I don't think this book that centres around women being "liberated" by a man making choices for them and having their entire life in his hands can in any way shape or form be feminist? The ending had the chance at being interesting and I feel like the whole point of the novel was to attempt to subvert everything about "hating men" and flipping it back so that men are taken out of the spotlight of blame but actually able to /explain/ what misogyny means to women who are tired of being aware of how unfair the world is women. But wrapping it up with a story where even though he is most likely a horrible person, it doesn't matter because he is a man and she likes being fucked by him, therefore, anything he did to other women doesn't matter because it didn't happen to her and she trusts him.

I'm sure this will work for a lot of people and part of me feels incredibly stupid reading this, but I just do not enjoy reading about a man telling a woman she has an “obvious rape fantasy” and then for her to react like she’s angry and upset only for him to continue to fuck her as she hits him and tells him to fuck off? Or who thinks he is just so good at reading women that he’s always right, especially in bed, and for the tone of the book and author interviews to have an almost mocking edge where disagreeing or thinking it’s wrong is the entire point? I dislike the insinuation that all women are fascinated with men and desire their compliments and attention more than anything else or that relationships between women are actually the default and easier because it is “shameful” to want to be with men.

I know I am biased because I am exhausted with so many literary fiction books presenting women who required male validation even if they can't stand them, but I expected this to be a subversion of that where the intersection of desire is also influenced by how people DO feel about women instead of treating the relationships between women as something so simple and so natural that they must not mean as much because somehow, dating men is so, so much harder but also, of course, more rewarding.

Anyway, I did not read this over so I don't know if it made sense but this book made me feel awful so congrats to the author because I know that was part of the point and I am so glad to have finished reading it.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

Thanks to Europa Editions for an ARC via NetGalley

[hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

someone else called this the fifty shades of sally rooney and... yeah (derogatory)

[CJ Alberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

What in the queer 50 shades of grey lmao! Messy but funnnnn. We love drama. Prayers for Olivia!

*I re read this and mostly feel the same lol

[Niharika (severely inactive) · Rating 1 out of 5]

All this for a guy called Nathan???

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book doesn't pretend that it is problematic. It is. The sexual exploration it engages in is risky. Nathan embodies what Christian Grey pretends to be: so privileged he doesn't even need to try to get what he wants. Compared to Anastasia Steele's virginity, the queerness of Eve feels not like an impossible-to-reach mountain top, but one that really should be forbidden to touch by any man. Olivia, as the connection point between Nathan and Eve, makes everything even more uncomfortable than a 'sexy' novel should be. The biggest strength of this book is that it doesn't shy away from its ambiguous sexual encounters. Lillian Fishman embraces them in an uncompromised act of freedom. I didnt like that the end came from outside the complicated relantionship between the 3 protagonists, but the conclusion wasn't the easy solution that I feared.

[⋆.˚ livia .☘︎ ݁˖ · Rating 1 out of 5]

i was expecting to love this book, i really was. a lot of my friends on goodreads raved about it for weeks since it came out. basically, the story follows a twenty-something woman named eve as she begins a sexual relationship with two people who are already seeing each other, olivia and nathan.

my main problem with this book is that nothing happens. now, i usually really enjoy literary fiction with a primary focus on characters rather than plot, but being inside of eve’s head the whole time was tedious and often very boring. her ideas about sexuality and power dynamics and how they apply to politics aren’t new ones and most of the book is filled with recycled white feminism that has been translated via a thesaurus to make it seem so much smarter than it is.

the first part is godawful, but the second part is really were things actually started to happen— not interesting or good things but things nonetheless. the way that sexuality and queerness were talked about, and the heavy amounts of biphobia and lesbophobia thrown casually into conversation, made me really uncomfortable as a sapphic person. i think the author is sapphic herself and in a relationship with a woman, but the way that she illustrated her ideas regarding sexuality and it’s correlation to political alignment and the pursuit of pleasure consisted of the kind of thing you might hear on the red scare podcast— all white feminism trying so desperately to be hedonistic and conversations devoid of a truly intelligent intersectional thought.

i’m not even going to go into the very poorly written polyamorous aspect of the book, other than saying that consent is a major issue and nathan is truly a horrendous character who probably made jokes about the me too movement.

this book set out to be an introspective look at unlikeable characters and their pursuits of pleasure, no matter how maligned said pleasure is with their beliefs and morals, but really it was just purple prose smut and a white woman trying her best to justify her feelings and decisions while not making a single intellectual contribution with all of her inner dialogue revolving around herself and desire.

[leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

one thing about me is i love a big-brained novel (rtc)

[Vanessa (V.C.) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was so bored. The writing was too cold, stilted, and impersonal for me, basically all telling and no showing, hardly any dialogue (and with no quotation marks, of course, because it's supposed to be "cool" or something), virtually no character development. It really smacked of an MFA writer who's just too self-conscious about their writing, so much so that the writing is just bad, but everyone's pretending it's good. It's also one of those books where the marketing claims that it's going to say something deep and profound about sex and gender but is really just another novel about an insufferable rich and privileged white twenty-something woman who's suffering such "ennui" with life and is vaguely "depressed" and refuses to see, enjoy, or appreciate her white privilege, so she has sex with unlikeable people and makes a big deal about it as if she's never had sex before and starts a lot of immature and unnecessary attention-seeking drama over it. Yawn. Aren't people tired of these stories yet? There are thousands of books about privileged white people problems like this already and this one doesn't stand out in any way. It was just all so ho-hum and trite and contrived, and just not interesting. For a book about sex, this wasn't sexy, nor was it liberating, or subversive, or feministic, or any other of the things that it wanted to be so badly but never does as promised by the blurb and the stunning cover. For a book that thinks it's so smart and deep, it really didn't say anything new, nor does it say it with any depth or substance. It probes a lot of questions, but never answers them. Instead of trusting that her readers are intelligent enough to figure things out, the author instead spoon-feeds every little viewpoint on the character's sexual politics by overindulging on rambling, navel-gazing monologues that felt very micro-manage-y, that we really didn't need and that only insulted our intelligence along the way. What also felt insulting: are we really supposed to believe that a woman who's been sapphic her whole life is suddenly being daring and boundary-pushing by having sex with a rich, toxic cishet dude with a God-complex, and it's supposed to be this explosive most life-changing thing? Especially from someone who treats their girlfriend as more of an afterthought, that she only mentions when it's convenient to the story, that she mostly uses to bolster her guilt and woe is me feelings for doing what she knows is wrong but goes about doing whatever she wants anyway, and largely spends most of the book hyper-obsessing over said rich toxic cishet dude alongside his as equally obsessed female partner. Even more annoying if not blatantly misleading is how Acts of Service is on a lot of LGBT book lists when in general the book is more about heterosexuality/heteronormativity than on queerness. To make it all worse, we're really supposed to be that emotionally invested in all this obnoxious rich white people male-gaze-y nonsense, as if this isn't already a tired literary genre? By now, shouldn't we want more for women and their sexuality than for them to obsess over violent, misogynistic, and abusive men who see them as nothing but sex objects? This wasn't cool in the 80s/90s, let alone in 2022. I just can't. This book sucked. It's a shame because it has a lot of promise, but it was really dated, too redundant and reductive, and is basically just an even more boring and vapid version of all the other books out there that are like My Year of Rest and Relaxation and similar books like it.

[Jaylen · Rating 5 out of 5]

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: in style, it mirrors the approach of cool, contained millennial novels (Rooney comparisons are inevitable), however Acts of Service completely subverted my expectations with how intellectually rich it is. Describing this novel as one preoccupied with the morality of sex, desire, and BDSM dynamics barely scratches the surface; this novel is dense in its philosophical explorations of the consequences of personal choice, and how being seen by others, even those who seemingly manipulate us for their own gain, can be the greatest act of service for self-determination. I anticipate this book will be everywhere upon publication, and I am eager to see its reception - it is dicey and unabashed, and I anticipate it will potentially be read as being exploitative, however I do not think it is. The novel is all about the self - who we are when we inevitably subsume ourselves in others, and the fallout that ensues. This is a tricky novel that I already can’t wait to revisit, and is one of the best I have read so far this year.

[olivia miss_ipkiss_reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you so much to Random House and NetGalley for the ARC

I honestly don’t think I have ever read anything quite like this. Acts of Service lives in the grey zone, it’s that voice at the back of your head that says “but let me just play devil’s advocate for a second”. The prose are sharp and thoughtful, the characters completely infuriating. I admire the way Fishman dives head first into the contradiction of sexual desire to the place where what we should want and what we actually want don’t add up.

Eve finds herself reflecting on morality and feminism while stuck in this manipulative situationship with Olivia and Nathan. It’s an arrangement that shouldn’t give her pleasure but does. She wrestles with compulsory heterosexuality and the politicization of sexual desire. In all honesty, there is so much to unpack here I feel like I only got to the tip of the iceberg on this first read.

I need a physical copy so I can re-read it and write all over it. Fans of Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, and Ottessa Moshfegh will really enjoy this. I will warn you now, this is not for everyone. The relationships explored here are toxic, manipulative, infuriating, even sociopathic. It’s a rich psychological portrait of a woman who is testing her definition of love, desire, power, and safety.