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 {read}