Weekly Book Thoughts: Fruit Fly - Josh Silver
Ugh. When the book everyone is raving about is actually really fucking good. Don't you hate it when that happens?
Fruit Fly took me a while to finish. I didn't want to exit the web that Silver wove here—this insane, complex little web where Mallory and Leo and Mandy and Liam are all insects caught in the silk and the literary world is the hungry carnivorous spider. I simply had to let this book's cannibalism of me take its time. I read about 50-80 pages at a time, put it down for 2-3 days, then picked it back up and read 50-80 more pages. Repeat. It's kind of like why I still haven't finished Extraordinary, or Community, or Stumble, or Second Best Hospital; I just do not like to say goodbye.
And these are incredibly hard characters to say goodbye to. They are both heavily sympathetic terrible people, watery messes of traits on a canvas (this sounds like a criticism of Silver's writing, most likely, but is a compliment); they make each other worse. Worse, worse, worse. It's so FUN. Mallory's obsession with Leo that grows out of the disdain she has for her reality is tasty, and I think that a lot of people can relate to Mallory's role here, despite the instabilities her circumstances have caused. (It is this aspect of the book that made me recommend it to my mother.) At the same time though, Mallory is unbearable, a crumpled ball of posh, pretentious privilege that Leo picks up and slam dunks into the trash can; she is like a mashed vegetable casserole of insanities and repressions, each shitty aspect of her life plucked from the ground in root form, the green tops chopped off, the meat of it all placed delicately in a dish and cooked at 350 for 1-1 ½ hours. (Actually, in the book, it is fish.)
Her husband and her mother take her out of the oven and eat her. The left-over parts of the carcass, the bones and grossflesh of it all, are what goes to Leo. And Leo is, of course, at his core, hungry. I think in a way Mallory becomes an addiction of sorts for him too; at the end of the book he replaces drugs with her. The interwovenness of the metaphors Silver uses—how their chapters bleed into one another, how she compares Liam to Timothee Chalamet and he later compares himself to Timothee Chalamtet, the parallels—-and how the book emphasizes the similarities between Leo and Mallory (to the point of almost hitting you on the head with it at the end)----just makes me wonder…
Leo says (IIRC) that what Liam wants and what Mandy wants are the same. Liam is gay. Mallory gets into the gay nightlife chemsex scene to sell her book, yes, but her obsession with Leo and becoming Leo/Liam/his mind as well as his sexuality… it reads both as exploitation and yearning to me. Bittersweet. The Willy Wonka bit that gives you an entire dinner in gum-stick form, each flavor flooding in after another; she is using Leo in this way because she needs him for every single flavor of her life, success and sanity, freedom and status, etc. She needs to be in the gay nightlife part of him specifically because the instability is her stability. She needs it because it is what she is craving—yes, an escape from her emotionally abusive husband and her shitty predictable life, but also. I think this could very easily be read with the interpretation of Mallory as a very closeted and repressed transgender man?
She downloads grindr and pretends to be a man. She takes photos of her husband and pretends to be him. It is the only thrill and excitement she has experienced since the release of her last book. I really could not get this reading out of my mind as the chapters went on, and as they continued to drill in the similarities between Leo and Mallory at their core. What Leo wants is what Mallory wants, and Leo wants men as a man. He even is explicitly attracted to her husband—-and Leo calls himself Mallory's boyfriend at one point too.
Leo and Mallory are two sides of a coin. I find it especially interesting that they invert one another in the sense that despite Leo's present, chaotic life, his past was relatively normal (or at least he describes it as such)----and in Mallory's case, despite her perfectly normal pristine life, she is deeply chaotic on the inside.
Like I said before, Leo is hungry. At first he wants to steal from Mallory, but what he really wants is another hand to eat out of, I think? One he hasn't driven away over and over and over again with his mistakes. He wants a hand to eat out of and he wants that hand to stroke his back and tell him he will make it even though the hand is bleeding desperately at its chipped, candy-red fingernails. He starves with a need he doesn't know how to satiate and believes in his own taintedness, and Mallory wants someone to care for that isn't the baby Ronan is trying to force her to have. Leo is it. She is also in love with him, I think, LOL. When asked if he views the book as "a kind of romance", Silver writes,
I think there’s a sort of toxic love between them. They are infatuated with each other in a certain way. It’s not a sexual desire, but it’s certainly rooted in a kind of connection.
Very careful wording there, Silver ;)
Anyway, stoned rambling aside, while I deeply enjoyed this book, there were a few parts that fell flat? The writing in Mallory's chapters—especially at the beginning—read heavily as an almost cartoonish depiction of the rich white author image, taken to the absolute maximum. At times Silver's writing feels one-dimensional in its portrayal and development of Mallory and Leo, and Ronan's characterization gradually literally flatlines as the book goes on; he becomes less and less of a character and turns into more of an Abusive Bro Husband flavored LaCroix. Overall though I found Mallory and Leo both to be interesting characters, relatable in ways that maybe they shouldn't be, and the connection between them is absolutely the selling point of the book. It ties everything together.
There were times I felt the prose was elementary, and there were times that the prose impressed me. Honestly, the prose itself was my least favorite part of the book. I found Leo and Mallory's poem snippets especially insufferable here… Silver's grasp on storytelling is what makes this novel work so well for me, and I do wonder how I would have felt reading Mallory's earlier chapters if I was not already obsessed with the "older woman ("older" "woman") with a weird fixation on a younger man" dynamic. Like, I may have DNF'd it there, but I'm glad I kept going with it, truly.
Also how was Mallory's mom taking online courses in administration if Mallory is in her 30s at the youngest. Did I misread that part.
I really enjoyed this book, and will definitely be requesting it for the Yuletide exchange this year. I kind of need to read Leo's book. I kind of need to write it, too.
⭐⭐⭐⭐/5.