Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly Is A Delirious Trip Through Queerness, Chemsex and Gaslighting

In Josh Silver’s breakout novel, Fruit Fly, the act of intrusion is unleashed in all its glorious, revelatory, bewildering chaos. Mallory once made a big splash with her debut book, a coming-of-age yarn about a girl forging her escape from home. It heralded her as an exciting new voice. But years have shuttled by and that blaze of promise appears to be stymied by writer’s block. She’s grasping for inspiration. When the novel opens, she’s chafing at a bubble of domesticity. There’s privilege but ennui lingers. Her husband, Ronan, pushes for having a child, which isn’t something that Mallory innately welcomes. Yet, she’s mild and doesn’t shut him down either. With him, she’s always skating on thin ice.

He’s sociable, disarming in public. He makes people laugh. But he can just as swiftly remind his wife about the tight leash he’s kept her on. Mallory trawls the internet for ideas. Reddit gives her a launchpad. Queer stories are all the rage. Throw in melancholy and hardship and voila! There might be a formula for success. This sets her on a path with immense consequences. She creates an account on Grindr with her husband’s pictures and stalks for connections. Somehow, she lands at a T-Party, quite unwittingly. She never makes it inside but stumbles upon Leo, who’s gay and defined by addiction. In him, she finds a suitable prey, though she emphasises her transgression as purely a creative reckoning. He’s the guinea pig for channelling her next book.

Orbiting the 22-year-old exhilarates Mallory. It’s a welcome disruption of her anodyne life. A taste of the forbidden stirs her. She strays far outside the confines her husband prefers. There are times when she’s alarmed and utterly rattled by the places exploring Leo flings her. Silver alternates between the anxious silo of Mallory’s house and Leo’s reckless exploits. She’s a scavenger even as she pretends and lies to herself. This book is all about transgression, appropriation, manipulation and who gets to own their story. It’s about secret lives, false identities. Mallory introduces herself as a therapist, Mandy, to Leo, offering pro bono advice. The incidents between them are transmuted into Mallory’s new novel. Soon, the boundaries blur between real life and fictitious projection. The invader becomes the one under watch. Positions swap. Leo shifts into just as active an interloper.

Sly, perverse and tender, Fruit Fly charges ahead with relentless pace. The pages whizz past furiously. Silver boasts no illusions of this book being any incisive literary examination. Pleasure is the key principle that guides the reader. After ages, I had an experience wherein I was actively wrestling to stash aside the book to meet the day’s needs. At work, my mind kept racing back to the spiralling pursuit of Mallory, her brazen quest of inspiration that is keener to mine possible narrative turns than acknowledge the inevitable risk. She’s desperate, determined, self-effacing. It’s especially amusing to see her try to lull her doubts to herself, rationalise her trespassing under an artist’s empathetic aegis. Early on, she wonders, “something is telling me this venture is perhaps a tad too voyeuristic, that I’m prying, or even meddling”. Is it “problematic”? But she quickly swats away the concern, calling it instead “unhinged bravery” that a rave review of her first and only novel lauded her for.

A spate of inner mumblings bares her to us in all her hypocrisies, delusions and miscalculations. The early sections where she’s trying to find an opening in gay subculture are delicious, a masterclass in striking tentativeness, awkwardness, delirious misjudgement. She hurries to bury the froth of shame and prejudice welling up while exploring Grindr. She insists she’s very sex positive, that she’s learning after all. Everyone should be open to learning. The trouble with Mallory is she takes curiosity a tad too far.

Silver frames Leo through the lens of a survivor just straggling to get from one day to the next. He’s sinking. His prospects are barely existent. He thieves his way to staying afloat. His parents have abandoned all hopes. Neither does he hold any tenderness for them. Rarely does he visit them. He’s a disappointment. But he doesn’t give up. Silver pulls off a feat in weaving between two primary characters whose desires, anxieties and insecurities messily collide. One thinks they are feeding off the other till Silver rips off the rug beneath our feet. The projection that seemed totalising gets challenged. Holes poke through. Perspectives unravel to reveal murkier dimensions. The idea of authorial control is something Silver keeps slicing through. Mallory feints and postures on several levels. She’s not just leading a parallel identity with Leo, but also conceals her feelings, impulses and motivations from her domineering husband. The equation between Mallory and Leo, with all its uneasy ripples, also forms an unexpected conduit for freedom from her gaslighting husband.

Not everything in Fruit Fly lands, though. Leo doesn’t quite impress on us, feel as rounded as Mallory. A slightness of characterisation stretches to his dodgy circles. I wished for greater immersion in the fraught spaces he has to constantly negotiate to scrape by. Fruit Fly needed a sharper voice in those quarters. Instead, he gets the short shrift within mostly brief, desultory sections and sporadic confessions through his poems. Perhaps it was an intentional haze, yet Leo’s world felt too lightly traced. The sheer danger he’s straddling every minute, the delicate balance between gratification, doom and despair, tend to go amiss. Silver also makes a bit of a high leap in terms of plausibility while wrapping up. In dishing out some sort of comeuppance, re-centring of agency in the targeted, he speeds through and glosses over the publishing industry’s clique-ness. It comes as too pat.  

It’s whenever Mallory seizes the page does the book stay on track. The novel switches from Mallory’s fabricated narrative to her horrified realisation of losing power over it. The skewed relationship which she thinks she commands hurtles into shocking directions. The reins slip out of her hands. Silver laces the book with gleeful self-awareness. There’s a diabolical relish with which he stages the unravelling. Silver’s appetite for nastiness, a quicksilver plot make Fruit Fly an absolute blast. He toys with the commodification of the gay experience, the acceptable archetype of suffering gays that drive commercial success borne off hollow pity. Is peddling trauma the only route for mainstream visibility? What kind of stories are allowed legitimacy? Which popular one even lets its queer lead walk into the sunset alive?

Fruit Fly exerts a feverish grip as it cruises through a minefield of provocations. Silver delivers an utter nail-biter. He has a lot of fun with two frauds locked in a tricky dance, But Fruit Fly also accrues toward a very touching confrontation, a moment of mutual recognition that cuts through all the performance. It’s in these tonal swerves Silver proves he’s an ace.