A review by bloupibloupreads
Sous le signe des poissons by Melissa Broder

mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

0.75

'The Pisces' follows Lucy, a 38-year-old woman who has been writting a PhD on Sappho for over a decade now. She initiates a break up after her long term boyfriend, Jamie, refuses to commit to the relationship. After a suicide attempt involving a car, medicines and donuts, her wealthy sister, Annika, invites her to dog-sit their diabetic foxhound, Dominic, in their massive house in Venice Beach for the summer, hoping to help Lucy finish her thesis and attend group therapy to help her. We then embark on a journey where Lucy does everything but help herself. From going to unsatisfactory Tinder dates to having sex on the floor of a public bathroom. She then falls in love with Theo, a man she met at the beach and who happened to be a merman. 

I don’t know what I was expecting from this book, but I am extremely disappointed.

My first time reading Melissa Broder was with her collection essay 'So Sad Today' that I hated. Not to dwell on it but in short: I didn’t feel like I was reading a collection of essays. It was akin to reading her intimate diary, I felt like it was maybe too much, but whatever. I tried giving her another chance. I hoped that her first novel would be different from 'So Sad Today', but it wasn't. 'The Pisces' is just like the essay collection, full of gross and weird scenes with a crude prose that just makes you want to gag. It’s weird in a bad way.

The main issue I had with this book was the main character. Lucy is supposed to be 38 years old, yet she acts like a 16-year-old edgy teenager who refuses to face her problems and keeps throwing tantrums. Not once in the book did she sit her stupid ass down and wonder “am I the problem?” (quick answer: yes, yes she is the problem). 

She was responsible for her breakup with Jamie and then threw a tantrum when he moved on, as if it wasn't what she wanted. She's the embodiment of dangerous pick-me-up girls. She constantly insults the other women in her therapy group because she believes they are crazy and she feels superior, she judges women based on their physics, she ignores her friend, Claire,
when she expresses her desire to commit suicide
just to go fuck her stupid fish-man
and she also sedated the dog she was supposed to look after to do what ? To go fuck the fuck the fish-man ! Again !
Her entire life revolves around men because of her inferiority complex and it puts everyone around her in danger. 

But you know, I get it. She IS supposed to be unlikable, at least I thought but I'm not so sure now. During an interview with Samantha Edwards for Hazlitt, Melissa Broder herself said she relates a lot to Lucy : “There’s a lot of me in Lucy (…) I feel really fondly for Lucy.” The interviewer then asks her how she sees herself in Lucy, and Broder answers that they basically have a lot in common. 

Now listen, I understand at 100% that you can write about a character without condoning their actions. For example, it’s not because you write about a serial killer that it means you enjoy killing people yourself. No, that’s stupid and I would never suspect any author of that. But here, the author herself came forward during an interview to state that she relates a lot to Lucy and she sees herself in her, you can’t blame me for taking a step back and side eyeing her. If you also read 'So Sad Today', you can see a lot of similarities between Broder's personal life events and Lucy's story. All of that is making me wonder if Lucy was intended to be an unlikable character or if the author was just projecting without noticing.

If with all of that you didn’t understand yet, Lucy is dealing with mental illness and some people might say that it was a good representation of anxiety and how it feels like and to be honest, I can sort of support this critic. I guess it was realistic, but I hated how it was so often portrayed in such a negative light. Mental illness already suffers from many negative stereotypes, and people who experience it struggle every day to prove these stigmas wrong just for this book to come out of nowhere and be like “mentally ill people are all crazy and they all do bad things, but it’s fine because they’re mentally ill”. Like being mentally ill doesn’t excuse being an asshole
and killing a dog
, but maybe that’s just me idk.

This review is already so long and I’m not done yet. I haven't talked about the excessive amount of explicit sexual scenes that make this book unbearable. I truly believe that removing the words 'pussy' and 'cock' and the sex scenes from this book will leave nothing left. When Lucy isn't having sex with strangers, she's either talking about sex or thinking about it. I’m not really comfortable with sex scenes, especially when they are this heavily detailed and also digusting because that’s where the main problem lies. Every scene is crude and nauseating and the "dirty talk" is embarassing, it's ridiculous. Don’t even get me started on the whole page where we get a description of Lucy trying to get ready for anal and putting her finger in her asshole to take the shit off like please bring back shame.

The ending is equally bad.
Apart from the fact that the poor dog died and Anika didn't smack Lucy across the face for killing it,
the ending is just terrible.
There is a sort of plot twist about how Theo wanted to kill her since the beginning, and he already has seventeen other women’s dead body waiting deep in the sea. I was honestly sad that Lucy didn't die or kill herself. I'm sorry, but this is the first time I ever wanted a character to commit suicide so bad, and I think that if she had died, I would have loved the book a little bit more. It would have been a decent 2 or 3 stars, I think. Anyway.

The ending is whack. I understand that the dog was supposed to represent self-love and Theo her codependency, and addiction, and blablabla.
Her decision not to go down with Theo means that she wanted to try to fix herself or whatever.
Nah, everything was just whack. And this pseudo metaphor for mental health and Lucy as a whole, it was just poorly done and pointless because Lucy was, once again, unlikable and had no redeeming qualities.
Her death at the end would have made the book 10 times better.

I also hated the blur the ending left.
Was Theo real? Was he only in her mind and was she imagining him? Was his purpose in being here solely to use him as a metaphor for Lucy's fantasies? Did she complete her PhD? She also mentions that she hasn't had her period for 5 weeks, is she pregnant? From who? What will she do? Will she return to Phoenix?
The ending leaves so many unanswered questions that I feel unsatisfied. I don't see the point in reading 300 pages and supporting an unlikable character when the ending doesn't have any conclusion whatsoever.

I'm going to end my rant here. I hated this book and every second I spent reading it. I'm genuinely confused by the positive reviews. It's the first time I don't understand how someone could have enjoyed the book.
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