acts of service book review

New Times, New Thinking.

The purpose of sex

Lillian Fishman’s bold and searching debut novel, Acts of Service, questions the meaning of desire and introduces a major new voice in fiction.

By Johanna Thomas-Corr

“Most of my fantasies are of/making someone else come” sang Bill Callahan in the Smog song, “To Be of Use”. The song’s narrator wants a kind of redemption that’s close to oblivion; to be of “some hard, simple, undeniable use” even if it is as an inanimate object: “… like a horseshoe/Or like a corkscrew”.

Lillian Fishman’s startlingly accomplished debut expresses a similar desire for purpose – and a surge of relief when it arrives. “I like that you seem to know just what to do with me,” the narrator, Eve, tells her lover, Nathan, after sex, in the presence of Nathan’s other lover, Olivia. Acts of Service is, among other things, one of the best novels I have read about what you are supposed to want sexually – and what you really want.

Eve is a 28-year-old barista from Brooklyn in a long-term relationship with Romi, a paediatrician. In the opening pages, Eve contemplates her naked body with the feeling that, relationship notwithstanding, it is not being put to its best use. She was probably meant to have sex “with some wild number of people”.

“The purpose of my life at large remained mysterious, but I had come round to the idea that my purpose as a body was simple,” she announces. She had thought she was a lesbian; she had thought men didn’t really exist for her “except nebulously, as acquaintances or obstacles”. However, Eve has an abiding fantasy about being in a line-up of naked girls scrutinised by a man who eventually picks her. Here, perhaps, lies a balm for the “civic uselessness” she feels in her dead-end job and directionless evenings watching TV. “I wanted to find my way into rooms where people would look at my body and say: I see what you have there. I know what to do with it.”

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The story begins when Eve posts nude pictures of herself on an online message board, catching the attention of a young artist called Olivia. The two women meet for a drink and Eve discovers that Olivia is not acting alone but on behalf of Nathan, a tall, wealthy man in his thirties, who looks after a private family investment office in Manhattan. Olivia, who is opaque as her black tights and as rigid as her Oxford brogues, is in love with Nathan. Nathan is also her boss. And yet however unequal the dynamic with Olivia is – and however much she fears becoming their “toy” – Eve is fascinated by the way Nathan and Olivia cater to each other’s pleasures, unbothered by the role that manipulation and coercion play in their relationship. Nathan also perceives Eve’s unarticulated need to be used: “You were made to be f***ed. That’s what it is,” he tells her.

Acts of Service may sound like a hipster Fifty Shades of Grey , yet it is one of the most searching and enthralling novels about human attraction and connection that I’ve read in many years. Part erotic Bildungsroman , part melancholy comedy of manners, it 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. The 28-year-old author, who was mentored by Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer, certainly deserves to be spoken about with the same enthusiasm as Sally Rooney – though she thinks very differently about moral responsibility and her writing about sex is much less coy.

Eve discovers she enjoys observing and having others observe her own “animal bawdiness” in a threesome. She doesn’t need to disguise herself as a “loveable girl”. “I did not need to pretend to be modest.” And she is sincere in her fear of “squandering her body”. Sex, as she sees it, is a kind of oracle – “a truth-teller just waiting to find me out”. She chooses not to shy away from the frightening reality – however unfeminine or socially unacceptable – of what it can reveal about her.

Fishman writes about sex in a way that is both beautiful and blunt. “I was too fearful of the world to go out and get f***ed, too plagued by hang-ups, memories of shitty girlfriends, fears of violence,” Eve confesses on the first page. “I was like a spinster full of anxieties and repressions, charged with chaperoning a young girl who could not fathom the injustice of the arrangement.”

That dual image conjures Jane Austen, whose novels are invoked throughout the book. Olivia is reading Mansfield Park when Eve first meets her, setting up a parallel between Olivia and Nathan and Mary and Henry Crawford, the vivacious, amoral siblings who so nearly tempt little Fanny Price away from her beloved but dull cousin, Edmund Bertram. Indeed, like Edmund, Eve’s girlfriend Romi is “uncompromising” in her sincerity and steadfastness; when Eve tries on Romi’s scrubs, she finds herself “transformed into a purposeful object”. As well as Austen, Acts of Service evokes Alan Hollinghurst in its elegance and vigilance, and Edith Wharton in its social dynamics. Lurking in the shadows, too, is Mary Gaitskill, who also explores transgressive intimacies in a way that militates against easy answers, especially in the age of #MeToo condemnations.

[See also: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: liberal feminism under attack ]

Fishman’s descriptions of sex are vivid and moving, lit by insight and rapture. Describing the moment Eve realises that she and Nathan and Olivia have “escalated in tandem”, Fishman writes: “I wondered if this was the heart of what I had always looked for – multiplicity, communion, a desire richer and larger than any singular desire, each of our wants absorbing the others and growing into a new kind of animal, ravenous and herculean. My own desire was blameless, swallowed up by the scene.” What’s impressive is not just Fishman’s responsiveness to the body’s urges in and of themselves, it’s the way she uses them to ask wider questions about purpose, ageing, fidelity, individualism and narcissism. Eve struggles to understand how her attraction to Nathan (whom we see slapping Olivia and dismissing the need for safe words in sex) can coexist with her “political commitment to lesbianism”, which when she first arrived in New York City, “rose in my life like a faith”.

She has no religious background and has grown up in a society that emphasises individuality and freedom – and yet the absence of obligation has not freed her generation. She and her peers “found ourselves believing in complexity” most of all, which ends up creating paralysis. This may be why she is drawn towards certainty, whether it’s the apparent nobility of Romi or the intoxicating power play offered by Nathan. She simultaneously resists a clear purpose in her career while yearning for a guiding principle, exhausted by her doubts and constant questioning of her own decisions.

“Had anyone intuited my needs or met them as Nathan had?” Eve asks herself. “With him I was able to admit the extent of my doubts, the side of me that hated him and relished my own hatred as evidence of something discerning and noble. It was comforting to say that I loved what Nathan provided me, and not the man himself. But wasn’t that the nature of all love? Gratitude, for how we had been made to feel?”

Acts of Service is ultimately a book filled with love, pain and celebration. There are no comforting conclusions. But as Eve says: “We love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tells us how we matter.”

Acts of Service Lillian Fishman Europa Editions, 224pp, £12.99

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The Best Fiction Books » Romance

Acts of service, by lillian fishman.

This ferocious debut novel follows Eve, an intelligent but alienated barista in Brooklyn, whose foray into online exhibitionism leads her to Olivia and Nathan: a beautiful couple with a discomfiting power imbalance, who ask her to join them in bed. What follows is a sexual awakening that forces Eve to confront questions of consent, masochism and gender roles. It’s not for the faint hearted: think  Fifty Shades of Grey as written by Rachel Cusk.  The Guardian described it as “a sex masterpiece.”

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Acts of Service Is a New Kind of Queer Novel

When 27-year-old Lillian Fishman set out to write her debut novel, Acts of Service , she thought she would be telling a queer story — by the end, it became a book about heterosexuality. Her acerbic and self-punishing narrator, Eve, is a queer woman in her 20s, tepidly navigating the city and a stagnant-but-stable relationship with her girlfriend. In Eve’s private moments, she takes hundreds of faceless nudes and stores them on her cell phone. Her life’s purpose may be a mystery, but she knows — and is invigorated by — the purpose of her body: “I was meant to have sex—probably with some wild number of people,” Eve says, in the novel’s first few pages. She suspects her desire is even more “savage” than a body count: “Maybe … I was meant not to fuck but to get fucked.”

On a night of isolation, Eve uploads three of her anonymous nudes online . A woman named Olivia bites, but when the two meet up in person, Eve learns it’s not Olivia who’s interested in her — it’s Nathan, Olivia’s boss and secret bedmate. The three enter into a polyamorous sexual arrangement in which boundaries run loose and cruelty and pleasure overlap.

The novel that ensues is razor-sharp hedonism, and Fishman’s characters lean into the granular pleasures of sex at the expense of a moral compass. “There’s a lot of pushback about using the word love to describe the way Eve feels about Nathan, or naming Nathan as the catalyst and hero of the transformation that Eve undergoes,” says Fishman, who’d rather tell you a truthful story about these three characters than an idealized one. “But it comes from within, it’s Eve’s own journey, and that’s what’s feminist about it.”

Let’s start with how this book came to be. 

Trying to write a second book now makes it clear to me how long Acts of Service was percolating before I started working on it. I was inside it for three years, but there were five years before that where the questions circling in the novel were very urgent to me, and I was talking about them with everyone that I met. It started out being more about the relationship between Eve and Olivia: I was trying to get out how it feels to be seen doing something you’re ashamed of by other women, and the new context that’s given to that feeling when you’re a queer person. It’s not just like you’re being witnessed by another woman who’s a rival or a stand-in or a friend, but also someone that you theoretically have a relationship with that you want to live up to, in some way.

That book started there, but it became a book about a relationship between Eve and Nathan. And I didn’t want the book to be about Nathan or heterosexuality. Those are things I was avoiding and was uncomfortable with, and I certainly thought of myself as a queer person and as a person who would write a queer novel. But that center announced itself to me, and I’m happy it did. The book is about Nathan and needed to be.

What made you uncomfortable, specifically?  

Around bisexuality and queerness in my life, and in the way we talk about it as a culture, there’s this framing of sexuality and romance as beyond gender. There are lots of taboo and discomfort around bisexuality because it’s so based on traditional binary concepts of gender. Eve’s attraction and her interest in this experience is based in a very conventional framework. That’s what bothers her about it, and what drives the thematic meat of the novel. All of the of positive conversation I’ve encountered around bisexuality is like, You love who you love! as though gender is sort of subsumed by attraction to a person, and the book I was trying to write was about how sometimes that doesn’t happen, and in fact, that structure that disturbs you is the thing that attracts you.

How had you seen queer experiences siloed in fiction before, and what conventions were you writing against? 

It’s not that I’ve seen it siloed. I’ve been thinking of how I watched Desiree Akhavan’s show The Bisexual when it came out in 2018. The show grapples with some of the same things Acts of Service is grappling with, which is basically how it feels to disappoint yourself and the queer community by realizing that you want to explore this mainstream desire that you feel very self-critical about and almost disgusted by. Even bringing Acts of Service out now, I do get sort of the exact sort of pushback that I was giving myself when I was working on it. I was worried about writing the things that Eve sees in Nathan that attract her. I’ve had readers say Eve’s desire doesn’t feel queer, because she’s so critical of Olivia. There’s also pushback in the framework of, This isn’t what queer desire or queerness looks like . And I don’t think that’s wrong. That doesn’t even really bother me because I don’t think the book is primarily a book about queerness or queer experience.

Speaking of the ways that heterosexual desire is fraught for women, and how it’s particularly fraught for queer and bisexual women — those tensions come through in the ways Olivia and Eve relate to each other. Can you tell me more about cultivating their arc? 

Ultimately the novel is Eve’s and belongs in her voice. Olivia is still a mysterious character to me, both the way she goes about that central relationship and her degree of disinterest in Eve, and moreover, her disinterest in the ethical questions Eve is anxious about — her disinterest in being a person that other women approve of at all. I admire that in her character, and it also alarms me. I don’t think I would have known or been able to really evoke that. I don’t think there’s a different way the story could have gone, because fundamentally Olivia is only interested in Nathan. She’s present because Nathan asked her to be. She does what he asks, she wants to please him, but she’s also not independently interested in Eve and never would be.

You write so lucidly about polyamory. What was it like writing this three-way relationship? 

It really excited me. The scenes that came most easily to me were the ones between Olivia, Nathan, and Eve. I tended to write them very quickly, and I could feel that I was working out some ideas I had about sexuality in those conversations on the page. My favorite type of writing is writing in which you can really feel someone working it out in front of you and it doesn’t feel pre-digested or pre-plotted. And those scenes felt that way to me. The great struggle in writing the book was trying to build out the structure of the novel around them, and making sure that the other parts of Eve’s life worked and lent depth to that relationship.

Eve was someone I wanted to stay on the page with for a long time — she doesn’t shrink away from vanity and follows a compass of pleasure instead of moral goodness. Were there any characters who inspired her? 

Isadora Wing from Fear of Flying and Eve Babitz’s narratorial self. Those voices feel like strong thematic parallels because they’re so fearless about their own pursuits, even at other people’s expense. But those are very funny, lighthearted books and essays, and Eve, the character, is much more serious, much more angst-ridden and neurotic. I have to say I don’t think she’s like me at all. I think that I’m much more fearful and cautious as a person, and I think something that was fun about Acts of Service was letting Eve take after Nathan as much as she wants to. And she can’t fully. I think the best parts of the novel are where she overcomes her own apprehensions and her own cowardice.

Throughout the novel, and especially toward the end, Eve makes a number of realistic but uncomfortable choices. You write through her decisions truthfully, even when they’re not necessarily moral decisions. What do you hope readers will take away from that? 

It was important to me not to villainize or exonerate any of the characters. In the end, I have a lot of tenderness for Nathan, and Eve does too. Her degree of tenderness is questionable and should be taken with a big reliability grain of salt. People have been having an emotional reaction to the book, which has been exciting to hear. The ending has also made people angry. It’s certainly not morally pat, and it might not even be morally fair. But some people are happy to see something that feels true to the characters’ experience; something that feels forgiving.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, acts of service.

• About the Book

A “bold and unflinchingly sexy” ( Vogue ) debut novel about a young woman who follows her desires into a world of pleasure, decadence, and privilege, unraveling everything she thought she knew about sex...and herself.

“Anytime I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life.” —Eve Babitz

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.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

• Publication Date: May 30, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Hogarth
• ISBN-10: 0593243781
• ISBN-13: 9780593243787

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ACTS OF SERVICE

by Lillian Fishman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2022

An evocative exploration of desire and sexuality, this dark debut will cause readers to question the very nature of consent.

Posting a naked selfie online leads Eve into a fraught ménage à trois with Olivia and Nathan, a wealthy couple with secrets of their own.

A 20-something bisexual in a fulfilling and happy relationship with a woman, Eve finds herself thrust down the dark, twisted, and sometimes frightening path of desiring a man’s attention. Along the way, she becomes obsessed with Nathan, by turns jealous and protective of Olivia, and distant from Romi, her devoted girlfriend of many years. When the sexual games that Nathan and Olivia are playing result in a legal dispute with a third woman, Eve must face her own complicity, the true nature of her relationship with Nathan, and the lengths she is willing to go to protect him. A coldhearted, unflinching, and unromantic chronicle of sexual exploits, emotional manipulation, and, above all, power, this debut novel explores the unconscious desires that can unravel a person's very sense of self. Eve notes that her desire for Nathan’s attention is, in part, born out of envy for his emotional independence: “I wondered how I could get what he had—absolute freedom, a life of embodied prowess, in which I might float through a landscape of love and sex without promising myself to anyone.” Reminiscent of Sally Rooney’s work, this challenging—and often disturbing—exploration of sex, bodies, narcissism, and a culture that no longer values sincerity is tonally darker and rife with cruelty. When Nathan tells Eve that he knew just what she wanted without asking, she is struck not by the intimacy of the statement but “the soft hush of certainty” in his words. But is this submission to a man what she really wants—or is it what she’s been convinced, all her life, that she deserves?

Pub Date: May 3, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-24376-3

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

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• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

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Sourmilkpages 's review against another edition, aleguiza 's review against another edition, lilyjdist 's review.

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Loveable characters? Yes

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• Strong character development? Yes

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• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

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Ameliahill 's review, mingz_tam 's review.

• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

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Acts of Service

Lillian fishman. hogarth, $27 (240p) isbn 978-0-593-24376-3.

Reviewed on: 03/04/2022

Genre: Fiction

Other - 1 pages - 978-0-593-24377-0

Paperback - 240 pages - 978-0-593-24378-7

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ebook ∣ A Novel

By lillian fishman.

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9780593243763

Lillian Fishman

Random House Publishing Group

03 May 2022

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• Genre Fiction
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Sorry, there was a problem., acts of service: a novel audible audiobook – unabridged.

A “bold and unflinchingly sexy” ( Vogue ) debut novel about a young woman who follows her desires into a world of pleasure, decadence, and privilege, unraveling everything she thought she knew about sex . . . and herself.

“One of the most entertaining books about sex I’ve ever read . . . The perfect read for fans of Raven Leilani and Ottessa Moshfegh, this is a book that will have people talking.”— BuzzFeed

“A sex masterpiece.”— The Guardian

A Kaia Gerber Book Club Pick Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New Yorker and The Hollywood Reporter

“Anytime I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life.”—Eve Babitz

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 complicated, three-way 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.

• Listening Length 7 hours and 21 minutes
• Author Lillian Fishman
• Narrator Rebecca Lowman
• Audible release date May 3, 2022
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• ASIN B09FFTG9BN
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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