Acts of Service: "A sex masterpiece" (Guardian)

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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. Just because women may now be 'free' to choose - it is still very disappointing that by far the most intense scenes have to be with male money and power. My point is that in making the male in this story the all-knowing giver, the all-wise wielder of sexual impetus… the exaggeration of satire emerges.

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. She also has a woman flatmate who points out the abuse going on , and there is only minor sex interest with the other woman in the threesome.

Maybe you will think that Eve and the people she becomes entangled with, Nathan and Olivia, don't act like real people. 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. 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. Romi was much better than I was at the crossword, but she was hampered by little free time and an aversion to competitive spite.

The author managed to capture so perfectly the thoughts of sexuality, gender norms, and expressionism in a woman in her 20s. Acts of Service ] arrives with quiet confidence and a fully formed bank of ideas about intimacy, sexual ethics and contemporary mores that Fishman could go on exploring for years to come. Uno strumento per andare alla scoperta, verso la conoscenza di altri corpi umani, e quindi di altre anime. 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. 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.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.

It also demands generosity, and Fishman is clear that what is so sanctifying about Eve’s sex with Nathan is that he has no obligations to her – that she receives pleasure from him as a sheer superfluity, as a gift. eve is extremely self aware and darkly critical, which allows for a plethora of passages of baroque self reflection. 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. That’s the only way her exploration of two queer women’s simultaneous experience of love and sex with the same man makes a lick of sense.

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. As far as [love] triangles go, the one in Lillian Fishman's debut novel Acts of Service is a perfectly messy inquiry into the nature of power and desire. It soon becomes evident that Olivier has been "bait" for her partner Nathan and a rather complicated menage a troi ensues. Everytime the author comes even *close* to making an interesting points or approaching any sort of nuance, she immediately changes the subject completely, leaving readers bereft.

The perfect read for fans of Raven Leilani and Ottessa Moshfegh, this is a book that will have people talking.

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.