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

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There are plenty of unlikely quasi-psychologcal ruminations and conversations about sex and power , but surely we are already aware that some people are addicted to inappropriate sex, to subjugation, some to being coercive.

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.Acts of Service doesn’t kiss you first; it gets right to it—depicting the liquid frequencies of need and power with a thoughtful, savage eye. 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. It is a book of exciting, provocative complexity, and, for me, it made the human creature feel like something new.

It angered me because it proposed the same old tired answer to the question of gender distinctions that men in evangelical circles have been throwing at me my whole life: I know what you really want; I’ll give it to you, soon as you stop pretending you could ever hope to know it for yourself. An] extraordinary debut novel, Acts of Service [is] a work of ferocious moral and sensual intelligence and a masterly defense of sex for its own sake. The poles of Romi’s nobility were her self-­sacrificing nature and her absolute insusceptibility to the superficial. As incisive as it is exhilarating, this novel asks us to face our ideas about desire and power: what sex means to us, the forces that shape it, and how we find—or lose—ourselves in intimacy. The portrayal of Eve’s absorbing anxieties would make for excellent satire if it weren’t taken so seriously, if any other character could pierce through her strange and moralizing ways.I admired her pushing the boundaries to talk about topics that are considered taboo, such as polyamory, infidelity, and manipulation. 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.

It’s also achingly self-conscious in that now-classic Rooney-esque manner but, unlike Rooney, it’s also very narrowly-drawn, claustrophobic even.Eve begins to question the power dynamics of the threesome after she learns that Olivia works for Nathan.

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