Book Review: Fish Tales by Nettie Jones

Of the many ways in which I unintentionally broadcast my lack of coolness to the world, the one we’ll talk about this week is my blind and rabid excitement upon reading or hearing phrases like ‘forgotten cult classic’. Surely nothing is cooler than a cool book that most people don’t know about, and so the desperately uncool try to acquire coolness by reading these cool books. What happens, then, when the cool book turns out to be rather dull, as is the case with Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales? Disappointment and inadequacy.

This would be a very short review unless I talk about what I thought the book would be about. The way it is presented in the literary press – amongst which Fish Tales was reintroduced last month to great fanfare – is as a scandalous, honest depiction of female sexual liberation and mental illness that was so ahead of its time that publishers and readers in the 1980s simply didn’t know how to handle it or its author. It is said to have a narrative voice so compelling that Toni Morrison herself was taken by it and was the only editor with the insight to bring Nettie Jones onboard.

Look: who am I to disagree with Toni Morrison and the literary establishment of 2025? I’ll leave the answer to that question blank but state the obvious implication, which is that I am probably wrong – but I do disagree. There’s a lot of sex in Fish Tales. There are a number of manic episodes and a character clearly struggling with powerful demons. And in so far as the main character is a married woman bankrolled by a husband that she marries on the rebound from her rejection by the teacher who groomed and sexually exploited her from the age of 12 in a life of experimentation with sexual partners, drugs and booze – all of which are depicted fairly explicitly – there is certainly a brand of reader who might find this scandalous, and another who might find it refreshingly liberating and authentic.

Unfortunately, this reader falls into neither camp. The first half of the novel is made up of short chapters each focusing on a different sexual partner. The second half tells of the narrator’s longer-term devotion to a quadriplegic academic. Neither half is very interesting. Despite being entirely centred on a single character, Jones fails to make one really care about her, and given the lack of anything stylistically brilliant or even unexpected, the whole thing – despite being very short – drags.

Basically, the only reason I can think of for reading this book is that it might make you sound cool in conversation with someone who hasn’t read it themselves. Maybe that’s a good enough reason for you. Not for me.