The Pisces: A Modern Merman Love Story

The Pisces (2018)
Written by: Melissa Broder
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 270 (Hardback)
Publisher: Hogarth

Why I Chose It: After reading Mira Grant’s mermaid novel Into the Drowning Deep and Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus’ romantic tale about a woman and an amphibious man, The Shape of Water, a love story featuring a merman sounded intriguing. The Pisces also fit the 2019 PopSugar Reading challenge category, “A book with a zodiac sign or astrology term in title.”

The premise:

Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika’s home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety — not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound’s easy affection.

Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy’s understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, The Pisces is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.

Spoilers Ahead

Discussion: The Pisces has an eye-popping, fascinating cover, featuring an auburn-haired woman with her head thrown back in apparent ecstasy, cradling the black silhouette of fish. The cover would be the last thing that I enjoyed about this book.

I don’t think I have ever disliked a fictional person as much as I loathe Lucy, the main character of this book. Lucy is a grad student who has been working on a PhD thesis on Sappho for nine years. Her long-time boyfriend won’t spend more than two nights a week with her, so she suggests breaking up on a whim. When the boyfriend agrees, she spirals out of control, eventually punching him in the face and almost overdosing on Ambien. Her successful sister, Annika, invites her to stay in her beachfront mansion for the summer. Lucy is a hot mess.

I could almost feel sorry for Lucy, except she is a horrible person. She’s immature, lazy, jealous, mean, and almost catatonically passive. The first chapter is Lucy having cruel thoughts about a younger woman because she is wearing shorts. She thinks her sister is fat and the other women in her therapy group are losers. She nicknames one woman, “Chickenhorse.” Lucy has a lot of sex with gross strangers from Tinder and is shocked when they don’t love her. She also abandons her friend who is threatening to kill herself because her date is more important. Lucy is possibly the most self-centered person on the planet.

In addition to creating a completely unsympathetic main character, Broder has also written a book that is vulgar and disgusting. I’m assuming that Broder thinks that being graphic about sex and bodily functions is refreshing and honest, but reading about Lucy peeing her pants in a CVS after getting a urinary tract infection from having sex in a hotel bathroom was just plain nasty. When Lucy goes to her first therapy group, she describes another patient—“She wore a pair of ugly white “athletic sandals” that she removed as soon as she sat down. Her feet were small, yet crusty, with one yellowing toenail. Throughout the session, she gave herself different variations of a foot rub—caressing, stroking, rubbing. She also picked at her calluses and between her toes.” (p.31). This is a tame example of how unnecessarily gross the book is.

Although the book is billed as a love story, Lucy and the merman, Theo, barely know each other. When she first meets him, she thinks he is an especially dedicated athlete, swimming in the ocean at night. Then Theo reveals that he is a merman and they have sex several times. I learned absolutely nothing about mermen expect that they have human genitals and can live out of the water. There is no dating, no romance, and barely any conversations. I briefly wondered if Theo was even real. I would have thought that he was a figment of Lucy’s lovelorn imagination, except for the fact that the dog, Dominic, went crazy barking whenever he smelled Theo.

My last straw with Lucy and The Pisces came because of the dog. Broder repeatedly describes how Dominic was a substitute child to Annika. She dresses him up for Halloween and refers to him as her baby. All that Lucy has to do in exchange for living in Annika’s fabulous house is babysit the dog. Lucy enjoys Dominic but quickly starts neglecting him to have sex with strangers. When Dominic freaks out over the merman, she starts feeding him tranquilizers and winds up killing him. Lucy is thirty-eight years old and can’t even manage to take care of a dog. The only thing that could have made me happy after the dog’s death was if Mira Grant’s killer mermaids showed up and ate Lucy.

In conclusion: I finished this book for the sole purpose of writing a review about how much I hate it. I thought it would be a comedic romance about how modern dating is so awful that loving a mythical creature is better. Instead, The Pisces was weird, crass, and depressing. The main character starts out as a selfish, terrible person and ends up a selfish, terrible person who has had sex with a merman. I read this book in January but I’m willing to bet that it will be my biggest disappointment of 2019.