‘The Pisces’ by Melissa Broder (2018) – 270 pages

Here is a comic coarse take on modern love. Our heroine Lucy is 38 and has just broken up with her long-time boyfriend. She is staying in her sister’s beach house on Venice Beach dog sitting and supposedly working on her dissertation on Sappho. In her spare time Lucy attends a love addiction therapy group for women who are all boy-crazy like junior high school girls.

‘The Pisces’ is all about Lucy the narrator’s voice of which some will find refreshingly honest and candid while others will find it self-centered and anxiety ridden. Although the novel makes it clear that Lucy is 38 years old, just by her interests and attitudes expressed, I would have guessed her age at about 16.

On the beach she meets Theo the swimmer and she is immediately attracted to him. He seems different, cooler than the other guys she meets. I won’t give away a major plot point of the story, but let’s just say there is something fishy about Theo.

‘The Pisces’ is a hot and steamy romance story told from the woman’s point of view with lascivious, explicit, and nasty sex scenes.

There are many New Age references in ‘The Pisces’ regarding such items as horoscopes, rose quartz crystals, and magic candles. There is talk of Internet memes and texting, and everyone is relentlessly up to date. There is also talk of getting nails and toenails done in a salon. Since my interest in New Age stuff and getting my toenails done is about zero, this probably was not the right novel for me. So perhaps you readers should take my following criticisms of ‘The Pisces’ with a grain of salt.

The other characters, the women in Lucy’s support group and her previous lovers before she meets Theo, are interchangeable ciphers. That these characters are not developed even to the point where we can tell them apart is one of the major problems with this novel. It is not really worth the effort to keep track of the little backstory these peripheral characters have.

As for Theo, he is a guy who is just too good to be true like the hero of an old TV Western or a police drama. This cardboard wonderfulness of Theo subtracted from my interest in him. But perhaps that is the point, that Theo is an unrealistic love interest.

‘The Pisces’ was the wrong novel for me.

Grade :    C