YOU GOT got into my dreams and changed them into fantasies—
The stupor between erotic slapstick and stoic mortification that should subsume anyone sentient after reading the inconclusive, concussive epilogue of Nettie Jones’s 1984 novel Fish Tales tempts you to return, puzzled and undone, to page one, to see if you overlooked the exact pivot from ribald debauchery to high tragedy, with its common mask of rage and madness trailing over the edge into insight. What reluctant encounters with the scuzzy alleys and attendant monsters between desire and pornography did I just witness? Why do I feel both violated and validated by a story so intricate and convoluted that it must be at least half autobiographical? Lewis, the novel’s protagonist, spends her years trying to heal from damage incurred at the hands of older men who refused to control their sexual urges by approximating them. Allergic to traditional approaches to courtship, she becomes trapped in performative rebellion against these traditions, a terminal party girl. Is this the part of my own story I’ve sublimated, haunting me, threatening to resurface? Is it the sickly adventure that taunts all of us who chose to abide what we perceive to be reality instead of affective Dionysian delirium, and have attended fewer parties and indulged fewer infatuations to prove it? Unlike Lewis, we have become witnesses instead of subjects, our mischief redirected because now we will do the work of revealing and cataloguing the truths and behaviors we might otherwise passively represent. Lewis narrates our adaptation of the biblical parable of loaves and fishes, wherein whatever you train your hallucinations on, whether it be the next novel or poem or film or sex act, will materialize and multiply.
Fish Tales, released this spring in a new edition and still pioneering decades after its first run, slices into the flesh of the novel of ideas with events and characters who loom so large they leave no room for indulgent ideological abstractions; they are busy being sluts and disasters at the exact moment you might expect more recognizable or coherent archetypes to buckle begrudgingly into the routines of adult life and surrender to them for the sake of reputation, supposed stability, or ego. Transgressive to the point of exhilarating, Nettie Jones’s prose avoids etiquette or the impulse to virtue signal: this perspective of a girl molested by her schoolteacher, whose life subsequently becomes so centered on male approval she pretends she’s sexually liberated instead of a victim of circumstance and tragic hero, makes no excuses for the procession of orgies and nervous breakdowns that becomes the novel’s plot. Hedonism grows banal as we’re trapped in bed with the protagonist, her demons, and the doom disguised as suitors, flatterers, and one husband, Woody, who after a brief attempt at real union becomes Lewis’s overseer and benefactor, allowing her to hire prostitutes or travel to New York to meet with lovers while he takes his own new girlfriend. All the while he sustains Lewis, “his favorite woman,” with an allowance and a roof over her head.
We’re cloaked in the sorcery of the 1970s club scenes in New York and Detroit, where the bourgeoisie—disillusioned by war, recession, the crushing of most radical movements, their own narcissism, and the desperate need to be seen as bohemian or “beat”—invented a hipoisie whose most interesting qualities were drug and sex addiction. In other words, middle-class Americans were mimicking or surrendering to socially acceptable abjection as if this could provide them with a personality or a culture, or because they might feel something just by rejecting the establishment and feigning eccentricity, sudden inspiration without having to leave the nightclub or the bedroom. We’re in that era and inside of the psyche of a woman who has convinced herself that it’s lust, and not despair or alienation, that inspires her to chase the thrill of more and more bodies. Characters who want to be glamorous and countercultural end up a withered and pitiful mass of misfit souls whose only access to real intimacy is through chaos, bickering, and conflict— scenarios and scandals they have to keep re-creating as they rotate through each other. They become as codependent as the married couples they might call square, nursing dysfunction like it’s an honorable or inevitable form of misery, undermining one another and themselves on purpose because they think it’s dazzling even as it becomes pathetic.
Our romantic lead eventually finds her ideal foil in a man symbolically named Brook, like a body of water you can see into but never safely enter, a quadriplegic who was injured during a high school wrestling match. Lewis goes from a lonely, histrionic, faux-gallant party girl who can’t seem to do much but host orgies, get drunk and high, and weep, to a lonely histrionic domestic worker, an expert nurse and custodian, a hostage in an unrequited love affair with a man who tolerates her because he cannot get around without her labor. Though he sometimes welcomes her advances, he frequently takes other lovers, reminds her she doesn’t ignite his passion, and begs her to leave only to cajole her to return after climaxes in their arguments. The quarrels are their displays of loveless love, their most tender and harrowing exchanges. A typical toxic dynamic with a twist—two helpless souls having finally found the counterpart who reminds them of themselves in the most incriminating ways, and deciding to punish this intolerable effigy with the bottomless cruelty and attention they had formerly reserved for their hostile self-recriminations. Glamour and horror become one aurora in the lives of these devout escapists. When they meet, it’s their mutual and cosmic duty to devour this paradox in one another, proving each rebellious habit or lifestyle choice shallow and pat. Together they can no longer linger in their respective delusions. For this oddest couple, ego death is death itself, so every disagreement grows more violent and despairing and portentous until Lewis kills Brook, freeing them both.
Once a murderer and not a beggar, she can integrate her courage and her victimhood and become both a real subject and a real witness again; she’s lived both sides now. All it takes is the blood of someone she claimed to love on her hands. Extreme desperation to be understood, cherished, or absolved of private suffering is often punctuated by obscene violence. She’s already exhausted the common alternative, a pattern of sudden retreat that also grows predictable and unsatisfying, when meaningless sex and dissociation have failed and no one is brave enough for sober love confessions. In murdering Brook, Lewis also symbolically kills Peter Brown, the teacher who raped her and made her his plaything for years; Woody, who not only cared for her but fed her doomed quest for release; her friend Kitty, a debonair fellow victim of too many parties who brought Lewis down with her; and the version of herself who was waiting for any one of them to rescue or repair her. Now she can deliver her testimony from a point of no return. She can warn aspiring it-girls trapped in fading subcultures that love is a dangerous necessity that no amount of crude affection and aimless decadence can mimic.
There is no one quite like Lewis in the literary canon. She is a black woman, but rarely do we consider her as such. She is likely beautiful, but never given the chance to luxuriate in her looks with any dignity. And she clearly possesses talent and charisma, but all of it is wasted on hypersociality and exhibitionism. She emerges possessed by her overactive, overcompensating pleasure-center, which when she isn’t having sex manifests as casual maladaptive epiphanies and vicious comebacks during routine altercations with her chosen family of outcasts. She never claims to be a feminist or speaks of political factions, but her deeds declare them. She is real, because her mistakes and blunders aren’t accompanied by disclaimers or moralizing. She does not ask for redemption, nor does she attempt to stand in for the entirety of her ethnicity or gender—she’s just flailing around New York and Detroit pretending her vulnerability is agency, acting like she enjoys being tossed between numbness, arousal, and sorrow until it takes her under.
We hope that Lewis will outrun the law and live happily ever after, but we know better. This was a homicide and a suicide. In a lopsided way, this relatively young, washed-up woman lived too much life, too soon, and needed to commit a brutal act, because she woke up one day and refused to be decent and healed for anyone else’s sake. Lewis is the matriarch of a version of the American family we almost never get to see, within which all the slavishly stylized almost-artists con themselves into one another’s arms where they will be strangled for pleasure—a collectively vogued masochism that persists when no one will call anyone’s bluff. That the publication of this work was one of Toni Morrison’s final feats during her tenure as an editor at Random House, not long after she published The Bluest Eye and left publishing to write full time, is fitting. Lewis is an evolved version of Pecola in the The Bluest Eye, a modernized take on the woman whose innocence is stolen early in life—she grows up to be a child. Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”profiles such lost girls, their potential for sovereignty-as-revenge. That anthem could play in the background at the end of a Hollywood adaptation of Fish Tales, as we learn that if you refuse to kill off your hungry ghosts they will eventually kill you. How bleak an outlook the story suggests for the melancholy divas who thought they’d escaped their fate in VIP sections, fancy dresses, and elite galas, only to realize that one day they’ve become the spooks they’re running from or covering for with those diversions, unless they’re prepared to trade them in, throw them back in the water, and even then. . . .
Austerity looms at the end of excess, even for those who deserve more joy. Nettie Jones delivers the folklore of women who grow enamored with their saboteurs and risk cloning them in protest. Jones intervenes to reveal potential exits from this cycle that seem like crises or curses at first glance. True touch, the story suggests, is in the place where the nerve has been served or dampened, and you have to imagine how it might feel to be whole again without the physical sensation, fantasize about executing your oppressor but retain the equanimity to let him undermine you slowly instead like a normal soul. Can you feel that? A catatonic woman cackling and cooing, He needs me / he just don’t worry ’bout nothing, cause he got his own, as she reaches for her knife.
Harmony Holiday’s Life of the Party is forthcoming from Semiotext(e).