I thought of my moon in Gemini, the twins, with their dual nature. I contained both man and woman. But Theo and I, we were two of the same. I thought of Pisces, the two fish, bound together by one string – one star – Alpha Piscium. In an attempt to escape the monster Typhon, Aphrodite and her son Eros turned into fish and swam away. But who was Aphrodite and who was the monster here? I had threatened to swim away so I wouldn't be the abandoned one. Now he was trying to punish me by leaving first.
Looking into author Melissa Broder's previous work, The Pisces appears to be the perfectly natural first novel for her to have written. She has released several volumes of poetry – and the language in this novel is definitely poetical, if not pretty – her last book of essays (So Sad Today) apparently deals with staring down the void and attempting to find meaning in life – as does this novel – and she even writes the horoscopes for Lenny Letter – which makes that opening quote an even more natural thought process for her main character to have gone through. With all of the visceral, discomfortable grittiness of Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen and the implausible erotic metaphor of Marian Engel's Bear, Broder has created something both ugly and beautiful; real, like life, even if it involves the incredible. When I explained the overall gist to my husband he said, “That sounds not only clever, but smart,” and that about sums it up. This won't be for everyone, but I'm glad I picked it up and will seek out Broder's other work.
I'd heard it said that when you're feeling good is sometimes when you're most suicidal. Maybe it's after you decide that you're going to do it that you suddenly seem happier. I don't think that's why I walked across the beach to the ocean that night. I don't think I was planning to jump into the ocean drunk or that I wanted to get killed by a stranger. I knew it was dangerous to be out there at midnight. I rarely even walked the boardwalk after ten or eleven. I think I just felt invincible, connected to myself, like I could do anything and be totally fine. Maybe I was looking for a new high.Lucy is a thirty-eight-year-old Phoenix-based PhD student – she has been (mostly avoiding) working on her thesis on Sappho for the past nine years – and when she unexpectedly breaks up with her longtime (but somehow casual) boyfriend, she experiences a breakdown that sees her moving to California to dogsit for her sister for the summer and attending court-mandated group therapy sessions for women with “depression, and sex and love issues”. Lucy judges the other women in the group very harshly (which other, better informed, reviewers point out is a common initial reaction for anyone forced into therapy), and despite being encouraged to not date and concentrate on herself for a while, Lucy immediately joins Tinder and has a series of disappointing (and graphic) hookups; this definitely does not help her mental state. But while sitting on the oceanside rocks outside her sister's Venice Beach mansion, Lucy strikes up a conversation with a hot, young late-night swimmer and begins to believe that she is lovable after all.
When I awoke it was after one a.m. and the tide was rising higher. My body was coated in salt and ocean foam. I felt like I was part of the rock and part of the ocean, and I wondered if this is how Sappho felt, even in her deepest desperation, part of the earth, like that desperation or longing or eternal cosmic want was something to be celebrated – something natural – holy even, or at least, not just something to be endured. What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn't everything you could possibly do all right?I loved that Lucy was working on Sappho, and in particular, that she was reconsidering the authenticity of previous scholars filling in the blank (lost) passages in the poet's work with guesses based on biographical or historical information. The blanks in Sappho's work mirror the voids in Lucy's own life, and Lucy's academic theories change and evolve as she begins to reevaluate the roles that her own blank spaces serve. That's big picture, but more up close, knowing that Lucy has studied the Greeks and their mythology makes sense of what Lucy encounters in the now, and that adds a layer of menace and irony as the reader suspects what Lucy must know deep down. (Does anyone not know that Lucy's great summer love is a merman, and that like Odysseus' Sirens, he can only be luring humans to their doom? Is he a manifestation of Lucy's suicidal mental state and an invitation to run away with him is but a call to pull a Virginia Woolf?) Clever and smart, I was both mesmerised and horrified by this read.
