In The Pisces, a woman and a merman fall in love
Melissa Broder wanted to meet underneath the fibreglass whale.
“I am #dtw (down to whale),” the 38-year-old writer wrote, suggesting a rendezvous in the Hall of Ocean Life, at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. She thought being surrounded by ancient marine specimens might be generative when it came to discussing her new novel, “The Pisces.”
The book tells the story of a catatonically depressed woman named Lucy, also 38, who slumps around modern-day Venice Beach in California, aimless and alone. Unable to complete her dissertation on Sappho and dazed after a messy breakup, Lucy agrees to dog-sit for her sister who lives near the beach, hoping the brackish Pacific breeze might enliven her spirits. Instead, she gets the itch to toss herself into the ocean.
One night, she crawls onto a jagged rock jutting out into the sea foam, but before she can jump into the waves, she meets a comely young surfer. His name is Theo, and soon the two are meeting regularly under the stars — she on the rock, he always bobbing in the ocean. Lucy begins to wonder why she has never seen him out of the water, or even from the waist down. Then, the truth emerges: Theo is a merman. Yes, an actual merman, with flippers, who has been alive for centuries. The love between a human woman and a sea-bound man echoes the plot line of the recent Oscarwinning film “The Shape of Water,” but Broder infuses her narrative with a sardonic, youthful twist.
Anyone already familiar with her work as a poet and essayist would not be shocked to find that Broder radiates an immediate, cosy candour. Living in New York and working as a book publicist at Penguin, she started an anonymous Twitter account called So Sad Today. While she had been publishing poetry for years under her own name, she decided to hide behind an avatar so that she could confront her anxieties at a safe distance. It quickly grew into a viral sensation, with over half a million followers and a book deal with Grand Central Publishing.
“The topics that interest me are the things that have been going on for a really long time and are universal to all humans,” Broder tells me over a light lunch. “We’re all born, we all die, a lot — most, many — of us fall in love, many of us have sex. These have always been my obsessions.”
What makes “The Pisces” an experimental, exciting work is that Broder manages to knead together the genres of magical realism — Theo, the merman, is always presumed to be real.
Lucy and Theo make love, many times, and there is a great deal of detail about merman genitalia. The sex scenes, which take place after Lucy convinces Theo to return to her apartment in a child’s sand wagon, are highly detailed.
When I asked Broder about “The Shape of Water,” she told me that she hadn’t yet seen it. “It’s simply that I’m not great about going to the movies,” she said. Still, she said, she is glad to be a part of the current vogue for aquatic love stories, both in print and on screen. She is adapting “The Pisces” into a screenplay for Lionsgate Pictures.
“The sea is totally a mystery,” she said. “The top of the ocean can be total chaos, but underneath, in the depths, there can be silence. Everything on the surface of the world is so chaotic right now, so there’s a desire to access a place that’s more uncharted.”
In recounting one woman’s star-crossed relationship with a folkloric beau, Broder has crafted a modern-day mythology for women on the verge — if everything on the surface stops making sense, you need to dive deeper.