Blue Lights and Melted Ice
Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service
Europa Editions, 224pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781787703858
reviewed by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
I remember sitting in the study room stuck to the chair. It was in the thick of summer, on the hottest day during a heatwave, and I was reading for my Masters dissertation. My topic was on seduction narratives of the 18th century, and though I was sweating like a nun in a Sadean plot, there was nothing remotely sexy about this scene. French libertine novellas lay sprawled out in front of me; pages of articles on ‘the nature of libertine promises’ or ‘the seducer as friend’ sat limp on a chair. Barthes kept me company, the Pleasure of the Text my one and only Plaisir, as I abandoned my notes on Laclos, Denon, Bastide and Crébillon in deep despair.
Works of seduction, the art of seduction, the act of seduction — the seduction of seduction has always, well, seduced me. The moves and manoeuvres played by those well practised and versed in it a thrill to read. But in all these texts and the scholarship devoted to them, the position of women — whether the seducer, seduced or both — was precarious; their pursuit of unadulterated pleasure a hunt they most certainly would lose. Even the great female libertines of French literature — Laclos’ Marquise de Merteuil and Sade’s Thérèse — end up punished for their unruly passions and unholy indulgences. Despite critic Phillippe Sollers saying otherwise, I found it hard to believe that women could really attain the ‘liberty’ that defined libertinage. I felt increasingly pessimistic they could enjoy sex for sex’s sake outside of the slippery and scrupleless narratives of seduction.
Cue another heatwave in another era of study, and this time I was the one sprawled out across the floor. No, not in a manner à la Merteuil or Mélite, but in a desperate attempt to remain cool in near 40°C heat. It didn’t help that the book I was reading this time round was just as hot, if not hotter, than any novella of the 1780s. Transporting me back to that sticky day of 2014, when the engrossing erotic exploits of such books collided with the qualms of my jaded 21st-century feminism, Lillian Fishman’s 2022 debut, Acts of Service, spoke into that old chasm of political (and sexual?) dejection. It intuited the objecting fears and rising liberties of such supposedly antithetical attitudes to sexuality and sexual life.
In fact, Fishman’s novel situates itself in this collision. It takes aim at and galvanises itself through this confrontation of philosophies. With its drifting and desirous young queer narrator, Eve, Fishman challenges the lines of social decorum, blurs the lineaments of queer desire, and questions the links between political identity and sexual agency. Splicing the novel into two Sadean sounding sections — ‘Attention’ and ‘Interrogation’ — Fishman stages a seduction of the most rare and subtlest kinds: one of opinion. Acts of Service may leave you with more questions than answers, with a new political and psychological problem to unravel, but it does so with the elegance and ease of a first-class seducer. Charmed and losing your head — and clothes — at the door, this is a novel that will have its way with you regardless of your former ideals and ‘firm’ beliefs.
Unlike the seduction and libertine novellas of the 1780s, however, Acts of Service does not need to bide its time. Full frontal disclosure occurs moments into the book, so that we begin in the reverse, with the arching and aching nudes of the heroine posted online; with a young body burning to be used, to fuck and ‘get fucked’. That her girlfriend, the seemingly dependable and masc Romi, is inches away in an adjacent room, makes Eve’s digital disrobing even more treacherous — and tantalising. For Eve, the online attention generated by these images offers more pleasure than her partner’s physical touch — a realisation that brings on a complicated dialogue with herself, one which exquisitely expands and contracts, like a beating heart, across the page. Though a novel that recognises how one blossoms and becomes under the sexualised gaze of another, it is Eve’s gaze into herself — the constant looking at and looking within that takes place during, after and before sex and sexual attention — that is the most seductive and liberating facet of the book. That is not to say Acts of Service does not live up to its title in rehearsing, re-enacting and luxuriously reclining in grand scenes of polyamorous sex — because it does. But it is Eve’s continual self-reflection, her post-coital or erotically emancipated internal expressions and explorations of self, that strike the modern reader.
It is this queer female viewpoint that is the most radical and radically divisive action in the book. Unlike much of the pornography of the 18th century, Fishman’s novel centres the sexual liberation of the queer female experience, but not in the way you’d expect. Layer by layer, Acts of Service takes apart and remakes the tired tropes and trappings of queer femininity, thereby revealing the hidden desires and experiences queerness could and does encapsulate. When Nathan and Olivia come into Eve’s life after replying to her posted nudes, the latter is forced, through the erogenous tryst she forms with them, to confront and embrace the latent longings she feels are in conflict with her queer feminist identity — latent longings, one must stress, towards a cis het man or rather the psycho-sexual roles and coordinates associated with heterosexuality.
Readers expecting a conventionally — whatever that is — queer erotic novel with a doubly femme fatale lead may revolt at what Fishman proposes. This is a proposition, to Eve’s mind too, that repulses as much as it excites. The fact that it is Nathan, cis het uber-privileged white Nathan, who gets under the heroine’s skin and into her bed more than the queer (and queerly behaved) Olivia will no doubt turn some queer feminist readers away from the book. I, for one, recognised in Nathan — the same man who repeatedly denies being a sadist after slapping Olivia during sex and the same man who continues to talk about scrapping the rules and figuring people out in the act of ‘fucking’ — the spectre of the 18th-century libertine living it large. (Gone are the rococo lace cuffs and coiffured hair; enter the tailored suits of the affluent debonair man from the Upper East Side). This is a man who, according to Eve, ‘floats through life’ with no one ever saying no to him. This is a man who, when engaging with women, contents himself, in every sense of the word, to be the one on top. In Nathan and his erotic encounters with Eve, Fishman doesn’t so much endorse a typical or toxic heterosexuality (nor a heteronormative way of relating) but zones in on the choreography of it, the performance of it, the power-play and potentially (dis)empowering game it really is. Fishman doesn’t so much displace queer desire; neither does she dispose of feminist gripes with the socio-political power accorded to men and re-enacted in the bedroom: no, instead she exposes the capacity for queer desire to incorporate all forms of sexual experience. She shows that feminism doesn’t have to be unaccommodating towards the specific kinks and sexual knowing it often decries.
In this the perversities of Sade, the moralist Laclos, and that early architect of material bliss, Bastide, flit back into my mind. One thing their literary libertines all had in common was their lavish mode of living, their suspension of the rules, their relentless pursuit of pleasure, their unprecedented hedonism, their philosophy of the bedroom — all such liberties and liberty were in the name of knowledge. Eve’s post-coital reflections reflect this growing belief, her disembodied meditations on, in, under and through the body a confirmation, a powerful proof of a sexual epistemology. This is most pronounced in Eve’s encounters with Nathan. These fleeting but full moments — however problematic and prone to repercussions — probe the nature of sexual service in a fast-paced, valueless society.. Feminisms of all kinds may find this epistemology lacking; a groundless politics and a murky groundswell when it comes to genuine political change. But here Eve’s personal taste, liking, libidinal urges and wants, however socially constructed, emerge; here the sexual ethics and specific mores of the individual appear.
Acts of Service may move towards greater self-knowledge for its heroine — a greater sense and sureness in what she likes being exactly that: OK to like. And yet Fishman knows this sense of self, much like Eve’s new-found power through sex, is hazy. Its beauty is in the indistinction of desire as much as it is in the distinction desire covets for itself. Like a sizzling hot day during a heatwave, the novel comes to us in blue lights and melted ice, crisp hotel rooms and a great glass bowl, whose depths Eve can never truly fathom or expel from her mind. Like a sizzling hot day, this novel will floor you with its dazzling prose, its exquisite intellectual intensity, its intoxicating ability to deliver with ease some of the most transgressive, hence progressive, seductive acts the contemporary novel is likely to see.
Works of seduction, the art of seduction, the act of seduction — the seduction of seduction has always, well, seduced me. The moves and manoeuvres played by those well practised and versed in it a thrill to read. But in all these texts and the scholarship devoted to them, the position of women — whether the seducer, seduced or both — was precarious; their pursuit of unadulterated pleasure a hunt they most certainly would lose. Even the great female libertines of French literature — Laclos’ Marquise de Merteuil and Sade’s Thérèse — end up punished for their unruly passions and unholy indulgences. Despite critic Phillippe Sollers saying otherwise, I found it hard to believe that women could really attain the ‘liberty’ that defined libertinage. I felt increasingly pessimistic they could enjoy sex for sex’s sake outside of the slippery and scrupleless narratives of seduction.
Cue another heatwave in another era of study, and this time I was the one sprawled out across the floor. No, not in a manner à la Merteuil or Mélite, but in a desperate attempt to remain cool in near 40°C heat. It didn’t help that the book I was reading this time round was just as hot, if not hotter, than any novella of the 1780s. Transporting me back to that sticky day of 2014, when the engrossing erotic exploits of such books collided with the qualms of my jaded 21st-century feminism, Lillian Fishman’s 2022 debut, Acts of Service, spoke into that old chasm of political (and sexual?) dejection. It intuited the objecting fears and rising liberties of such supposedly antithetical attitudes to sexuality and sexual life.
In fact, Fishman’s novel situates itself in this collision. It takes aim at and galvanises itself through this confrontation of philosophies. With its drifting and desirous young queer narrator, Eve, Fishman challenges the lines of social decorum, blurs the lineaments of queer desire, and questions the links between political identity and sexual agency. Splicing the novel into two Sadean sounding sections — ‘Attention’ and ‘Interrogation’ — Fishman stages a seduction of the most rare and subtlest kinds: one of opinion. Acts of Service may leave you with more questions than answers, with a new political and psychological problem to unravel, but it does so with the elegance and ease of a first-class seducer. Charmed and losing your head — and clothes — at the door, this is a novel that will have its way with you regardless of your former ideals and ‘firm’ beliefs.
Unlike the seduction and libertine novellas of the 1780s, however, Acts of Service does not need to bide its time. Full frontal disclosure occurs moments into the book, so that we begin in the reverse, with the arching and aching nudes of the heroine posted online; with a young body burning to be used, to fuck and ‘get fucked’. That her girlfriend, the seemingly dependable and masc Romi, is inches away in an adjacent room, makes Eve’s digital disrobing even more treacherous — and tantalising. For Eve, the online attention generated by these images offers more pleasure than her partner’s physical touch — a realisation that brings on a complicated dialogue with herself, one which exquisitely expands and contracts, like a beating heart, across the page. Though a novel that recognises how one blossoms and becomes under the sexualised gaze of another, it is Eve’s gaze into herself — the constant looking at and looking within that takes place during, after and before sex and sexual attention — that is the most seductive and liberating facet of the book. That is not to say Acts of Service does not live up to its title in rehearsing, re-enacting and luxuriously reclining in grand scenes of polyamorous sex — because it does. But it is Eve’s continual self-reflection, her post-coital or erotically emancipated internal expressions and explorations of self, that strike the modern reader.
It is this queer female viewpoint that is the most radical and radically divisive action in the book. Unlike much of the pornography of the 18th century, Fishman’s novel centres the sexual liberation of the queer female experience, but not in the way you’d expect. Layer by layer, Acts of Service takes apart and remakes the tired tropes and trappings of queer femininity, thereby revealing the hidden desires and experiences queerness could and does encapsulate. When Nathan and Olivia come into Eve’s life after replying to her posted nudes, the latter is forced, through the erogenous tryst she forms with them, to confront and embrace the latent longings she feels are in conflict with her queer feminist identity — latent longings, one must stress, towards a cis het man or rather the psycho-sexual roles and coordinates associated with heterosexuality.
Readers expecting a conventionally — whatever that is — queer erotic novel with a doubly femme fatale lead may revolt at what Fishman proposes. This is a proposition, to Eve’s mind too, that repulses as much as it excites. The fact that it is Nathan, cis het uber-privileged white Nathan, who gets under the heroine’s skin and into her bed more than the queer (and queerly behaved) Olivia will no doubt turn some queer feminist readers away from the book. I, for one, recognised in Nathan — the same man who repeatedly denies being a sadist after slapping Olivia during sex and the same man who continues to talk about scrapping the rules and figuring people out in the act of ‘fucking’ — the spectre of the 18th-century libertine living it large. (Gone are the rococo lace cuffs and coiffured hair; enter the tailored suits of the affluent debonair man from the Upper East Side). This is a man who, according to Eve, ‘floats through life’ with no one ever saying no to him. This is a man who, when engaging with women, contents himself, in every sense of the word, to be the one on top. In Nathan and his erotic encounters with Eve, Fishman doesn’t so much endorse a typical or toxic heterosexuality (nor a heteronormative way of relating) but zones in on the choreography of it, the performance of it, the power-play and potentially (dis)empowering game it really is. Fishman doesn’t so much displace queer desire; neither does she dispose of feminist gripes with the socio-political power accorded to men and re-enacted in the bedroom: no, instead she exposes the capacity for queer desire to incorporate all forms of sexual experience. She shows that feminism doesn’t have to be unaccommodating towards the specific kinks and sexual knowing it often decries.
In this the perversities of Sade, the moralist Laclos, and that early architect of material bliss, Bastide, flit back into my mind. One thing their literary libertines all had in common was their lavish mode of living, their suspension of the rules, their relentless pursuit of pleasure, their unprecedented hedonism, their philosophy of the bedroom — all such liberties and liberty were in the name of knowledge. Eve’s post-coital reflections reflect this growing belief, her disembodied meditations on, in, under and through the body a confirmation, a powerful proof of a sexual epistemology. This is most pronounced in Eve’s encounters with Nathan. These fleeting but full moments — however problematic and prone to repercussions — probe the nature of sexual service in a fast-paced, valueless society.. Feminisms of all kinds may find this epistemology lacking; a groundless politics and a murky groundswell when it comes to genuine political change. But here Eve’s personal taste, liking, libidinal urges and wants, however socially constructed, emerge; here the sexual ethics and specific mores of the individual appear.
Acts of Service may move towards greater self-knowledge for its heroine — a greater sense and sureness in what she likes being exactly that: OK to like. And yet Fishman knows this sense of self, much like Eve’s new-found power through sex, is hazy. Its beauty is in the indistinction of desire as much as it is in the distinction desire covets for itself. Like a sizzling hot day during a heatwave, the novel comes to us in blue lights and melted ice, crisp hotel rooms and a great glass bowl, whose depths Eve can never truly fathom or expel from her mind. Like a sizzling hot day, this novel will floor you with its dazzling prose, its exquisite intellectual intensity, its intoxicating ability to deliver with ease some of the most transgressive, hence progressive, seductive acts the contemporary novel is likely to see.