Fruit Fly
Fruit Fly
Author: Josh Silver
Rating: A
Vibe: A dark, very funny satire about who gets to profit from gay pain, with a gay character who refuses to be anyone’s material.
If you’ve spent any time in gay bars, you know the term “fruit fly”: a straight woman who attaches herself to gay men, usually with more enthusiasm than understanding. Josh Silver’s first novel for adults gives us the ultimate one, and she isn’t after brunch plans. She’s after a book deal.
Mallory Maddox was a literary star once. Now she’s seven years into a case of writer’s block, hiding in the downstairs bathroom at her own North London parties and nodding along when someone says she’s very Clarissa Dalloway, as if she’s read the book. Then she meets Leo, a young gay man who is living rough, struggling with addiction and trading sex to survive. Mallory decides his story is exactly what her career needs, and that it’s hers to tell. As her secrets pile up, the question becomes how far she’ll go to finish the book.
It’s a satire with the pacing of a thriller, and it’s darker and funnier than that description suggests. Some scenes genuinely shocked me. Others made me laugh out loud, including the moment Mallory hears about a “tea party” and assumes there will be tea. Silver has a great ear for literary posturing. He skewers the dinner-party crowd and a publishing industry that rewards a good trauma story no matter whose trauma it is, and he never lets the jokes soften the stakes.
Mallory works because she isn’t one note. She’s needy, funny and fully aware of her lies, and she keeps telling them anyway, which makes her feel uncomfortably current. Silver is sharp about a very modern instinct: treating someone else’s suffering as content, then calling it empathy. I spent half the book wanting her caught and the other half hoping she’d get away with it. She’s less a villain than a very recognizable kind of person, someone convinced that wanting a story badly enough means she deserves it.
The book’s real achievement, though, is Leo. A setup like this could easily turn him into a prop, the tragic gay boy who exists to give a straight woman’s novel some edge. Silver doesn’t let that happen. We get Leo’s backstory in snippets, and it’s enormously compelling. By the end, he’s a full person, and he bucks the stereotypes the premise practically invites. I loved that.
I’m what you might call a connoisseur of M/M romance, so I know this book is talking to my genre. But its target isn’t women writing about gay men. It’s people capitalizing on other people’s stories, and respect changes everything. A bachelorette party that storms a gay bar, causes problems and makes the night about itself is a problem. A woman who comes to the drag show, tips the queen and doesn’t vote Republican the next day is a welcome guest. Mallory is the bachelorette party. Silver has said he wants readers to ask why we want to watch someone else’s pain, and that question lands on all of us who read for a living, or for fun.
This one won’t be for everyone, and you should check out trigger warnings before starting. The subject matter is heavy, addiction and survival sex among it, and Mallory’s voice is built to make you squirm. If you like your satire gentle, this isn’t it.
Grade: A. For a debut, “Fruit Fly” is remarkably assured: shocking, very funny and smarter than its premise needs to be. A24 is adapting it for television, so read it now, before Mallory ruins brunch for everyone.
