The Stork and the Threesome

What makes a life—and an novel—meaningful?

Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service made me want to get desperately, thoroughly, violently fucked by a man; L. M. Montgomery’s Anne’s House of Dreams made me want to hold hands with him while strolling through a moonlit garden. These books I bring together not because of similarities in style, correspondences in theme, or a likeness between protagonists, but out of mere coincidence, a certain stroke of fate, the way Aristotle’s Metaphysics got its name by rubbing shoulders on the bookshelf with a volume he’d actually remembered to title (Physics).

You see, a couple of weekends ago I picked up Anne’s House of Dreams from a Little Free Library by the side of the road, ecstatic to have encountered my favorite heroine by chance, ecstatic to pick up just where I’d left off with her, ecstatic to have yet more of the magic of Montgomery’s amethyst evenings and “kindred spirits” and the delicious, homespun delights, the virtues and charms of her Prince Edward Island, one of those rare fictional places you can enter after an absence of any length and find that a place setting is still laid for you on the table and a fire still roars in the hearth. I had meant to savor the novel, to let Montgomery’s words and world melt, dissolve, spread slowly and lingeringly across the palate of my mind, but instead I bit with relish and devoured greedily, quickly, all too quickly.

Robert Delaunay, Nude Woman Reading (1915)

The end of a good book always leaves you with a bittersweet taste in your mouth: the pleasure of a beautiful experience mingled with the pain that no good thing lasts forever, the triumph of having scaled the mountain mingled with the tragedy of having no more mountain to scale, the satisfaction of finding out at last what fate befalls each character mingled with the sorrow of having to say goodbye to creatures now dear and familiar. In the wake of this absence, I cast around for something to fill the void, came across Lillian Fishman’s story “Travesty” in The New Yorker, liked it, and decided to read her debut novel, Acts of Service, which came out in 2022.

Acts of Service concerns a young woman, Eve, who lives in New York City, has a girlfriend, Romi, and “had talked [her]self all the way from an attraction to women into a political commitment to lesbianism.” This political commitment is shaken when she posts her nudes online, is messaged by a woman, Olivia, and learns that Olivia is not just acting “single spies” but on behalf of her boyfriend, Nathan. Though it is Olivia Eve is first drawn to, it is Nathan who keeps her coming back again and again, Nathan who splits open the core of her being (literally and figuratively) and transforms her life, Nathan who is everything she shouldn’t want but does—straight, white, male, wealthy, in his professional life the head of a private family investment office, in his personal life sexually dominant, able to pleasure and please a litany of women with perfect ease.

If Acts of Service has a thesis, it’s that sex, in and of itself, without being bound to the institution of marriage, scaffolded by the safety of a relationship, or underpinned by the spiritual magic of love, can be a profoundly transformative experience. Eve’s friend Fatima invokes Eve Babitz’s notion of “sex masterpieces,” that these are “the only creative adventures” that most people will ever have—as Nathan says early on in the novel, “My art is fucking.”

Sex occurs in Anne’s House of Dreams, too, but never explicitly, not even really implicitly, just gestured to in the vaguest possible manner, as something that must by logic have happened in the deepest, most shadowy recesses backstage in order for certain other things to have been effected, namely babies. The novel’s heroine, the beloved Anne Shirley, is about the same age as Acts of Service’s Eve, maybe a year or two younger, but at 25 her life has a very different shape. She begins the book by marrying her childhood enemy and longtime sweetheart, Gilbert Blythe, and moving with him from their hometown of Avonlea to Four Winds, a little community by the sea, where, as a newly minted medical doctor, he takes over his uncle’s medical practice.

There she meets and befriends Captain Jim, an old, kindhearted sailor who operates the local lighthouse and has a knack for storytelling; Miss Cornelia Bryant, an unmarried middle-aged woman who uses any chance she can get to upbraid, vituperate, and castigate the less fair sex; and Leslie Moore, Anne’s 28-year-old neighbor, whose beauty and brilliance have been thwarted by a series of unspeakable tragedies, leaving her in a precarious financial situation and burdened with the care of her cognitively disabled husband, who, when his faculties were intact, was once cruel to her, whom she married out of coercion, and whom she does not love.

Here is how Montgomery describes the process by which Anne and Gilbert have a baby:

“One morning, when a windy golden sunrise was billowing over the gulf in waves of light, a certain weary stork flew over the bar of Four Winds Harbour on his way from the Land of Evening Stars. Under his wing was tucked a sleepy, starry-eyed, little creature. The stork was tired, and he looked wistfully about him. He knew he was somewhere near his destination, but he could not see it. The big, white light-house on the red sandstone cliff had its good points; but no stork possessed of any gumption would leave a new, velvet baby there. An old gray house, surrounded by willows, in a blossomy brook valley, looked more promising, but did not seem quite the thing either. The staring green abode further on was manifestly out of the question. Then the stork brightened up. He had caught sight of the very place—a little white house nestled against a big, whispering fir-wood, with a spiral of blue smoke winding up from its kitchen chimney—a house which just looked as if it were meant for babies. The stork gave a sigh of satisfaction, and softly alighted on the ridge-pole.”

In the years since the sexual revolution, we’ve exulted in the freedom to both have and depict sex, reveling in our new abandon, cherishing the pleasures of the flesh. But I can’t tell you how immeasurably tickled I was by this passage, the way it imbues a rather silly cliché, more often than not used like a parent’s hands over a child’s ears to protect those tender organs from the more unpleasant, messier truth of how babies come into the world, with imagination, entering into the subjectivity of the stork, personifying him as “weary,” as “look[ing] wistfully,” as weighing the pros and cons of the homes he sees, as “brighten[ing] up” and sighing in satisfaction. Montgomery never gives us a glimpse into this most private interior of Anne and Gilbert’s newlywed days, is reticent even about giving us moments of marital romance, as though we the reader were a young Victorian lady and she our severe Victorian chaperone, shielding our eyes and leading us away with a brisk, “Come, come,” to look instead at the flowers or go in to tea. Though a part of me desperately wanted a peek, the imagination, humor, and delicacy of the stork passage I found a more than satisfactory substitute for the titillation, passion, and excitement of sex.

We are in an interesting moment for young women. Against the previous decade’s prevailing mores of girlboss feminism and sexual license, that women can and should leave marriage and babies for later (or for never), that men are evil oppressors upholding an evil, oppressive patriarchy, that women can “have it all” with all the agility and coordination of an octopus, younger women are preferring to opt for a “soft life,” to invest in the idea of the “divine feminine,” to tout marriage and motherhood as attractive alternatives to a careerism they see as unfulfilling and exhausting.

So the question of these two novels, it seems to me, is how should a young woman live? What kind of life should a woman in her 20s lead—what should she value, and what should she choose? What is it that constitutes a meaningful life? The answers in Anne’s House of Dreams are pretty clear. Anne’s marriage with Gilbert, a loving marriage based on mutual respect, admiration, and kindness towards each other, serves as the foundation of her adult life, the stable base from which she can explore the world and and to which she can return to heal when the world wounds. There is the natural beauty of her new surroundings—the great beauty of the sea and the changing of the seasons and the “great glory of pink wild roses.” There is, as always, Anne’s imagination, which gives this landscape its human touches and inquires into the lives of others not nosily, not spitefully or intrusively, but to learn a fellow human heart, to find perhaps a “kindred spirit.” There are her close relationships with the Green Gables folk that remain in spite of her change of address, especially her guardian Marilla, who visits during holidays, who paces and prays when the baby comes, who gives succor and comfort when the baby passes.

But where in previous novels Anne had school or university or teaching or writing, here, while Gilbert is out doctoring, in the gap between girlhood and motherhood, her life derives the most meaning from the community around her and the new friendships she forges. Her meaning comes from understanding Captain Jim, Miss Cornelia, Leslie, from appreciating them with all their quirks and follies and foibles, from conversations and laughter and shared memories and storytelling, from the joy they bring to each other’s lives and the connection they create in the little “house of dreams.”

Not everything is sunshine and roses. Bad things happen—Anne and Gilbert’s first baby dies soon after birth; their marriage is not wholly free from rifts and conflicts; good friends must cross the bar, while other friendships are tainted with the sourness of envy. Fishman, in an essay for

The Metropolitan Review

, writes that in our era, “the pillars of faith, marriage, and children have been emptied out.” In Anne’s era, these pillars remain firm, and they allow characters in Anne’s House of Dreams to navigate life’s difficulties, to puzzle out its conundrums and steer through its choppier waters, emerging not unscathed but at least in tact.

Take faith. Near the end of the novel, a major disagreement arises between Anne and Gilbert over the subject of curing Leslie’s once cruel, now disabled husband George. Gilbert comes across a surgery that would restore George’s faculties and believes he has a duty to tell Leslie; Anne vehemently wants Gilbert to keep this information to himself, lest George return to his former cruel self and make poor Leslie’s already hard, unhappy life yet harder and unhappier. But Gilbert cannot shake off a sense of moral duty, turning at last to his faith:

“‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ I believe that, Anne, with all my heart. It’s the greatest and grandest verse in the Bible—or in any literature—and the TRUEST, if there are comparative degrees of trueness. And it’s the first duty of a man to tell the truth, as he sees it and believes it.”

Anne decides to “disagree and commit” (though not without torturing her husband a little first), Leslie is told, the operation is performed, and—in a turn of events nobody could have predicted, the truth does indeed, happily, “make free.”

Acts of Service presents a vastly different life for a woman in her 20s. Eve seems to drift along aimlessly, and neither her sexuality nor her job nor her relationships nor the city seem to offer her much in terms of making something meaningful out of her life. As a character I find her hard to imagine, hard to picture holding a conversation with—she’s almost a ghostly presence; she could be any young, liberal woman in New York City. The most vivid thing about her is her perfect, beautiful body, which is in fact what sets the novel’s plot in motion: her urge to photograph that body and have its beauty validated by strangers online is what leads her to enter a relationship with Nathan and Olivia. Later on, she muses that she is only really herself when “undressed in Nathan’s living room.”

Olivia is obsessed with Nathan, totally under his thumb and his spell, but outside of him she has her art, which she feels intensely about and which she approaches with the same fervor and dedication. Outside of the threesome, Nathan has his work at the investment office and—he eventually reveals—his wife of seven years. But what does Eve have outside of this bizarre love triangle? Her relationship falls apart, her lesbianism unravels. Her job as a barista promises little in terms of career growth or financial prospects—it’s just something to do while she waits for her father’s money to drift on down to her. We only see her having one friendship, that which she has with her roommate Fatima, but this has neither the depth nor the richness of Anne’s friendships with her neighbors. Her relationship with her father mainly consists of him pressuring her to find a “real” job; she lies to him, then reveals the lie—not that it has much effect on the relationship anyway.

With the collapse of the old pillars, young, intelligent women in such novels either choose to opt out of life altogether or revert to the realm of the senses. In Acts of Service, the single pillar becomes Nathan’s penis, which single-penisedly does away with all the beliefs and ideology a young, liberal, supposedly lesbian woman living in a big city can be thought to have in our day and age:

“When I was with Nathan I was compelled by him into a kind of raw state, a state of grotesque candor, in which I had unfettered access… to the beliefs that had been instilled in me against my will.”

Sex is a world in which you can forget everything, escape everything—beliefs can be suspended, rules, norms, and conventions go out the window, everything narrows to only pleasure, and the question is not “Is it right?” or “What does it mean?” but “Does this feel good?” And what feels good, it turns out, rarely takes its cue from what we think should feel good. If sex with Nathan is the transformative, magical experience Eve and the novel seem to want us to think it is, I’m not quite sure what we are left with in the end. Pillars of marble (faith, marriage, children) are replaced by pillars of sand (feminism, lesbianism) are replaced by pillars of air (threesomes).

As a young woman, I often find myself grappling with the question “How should a life be?” and as a writer with the question “How should a novel be?” What makes a life and a novel meaningful? As much as I loved Fishman’s prose, as much as I didn’t want to stop reading, I found it hard to put my faith in sex—a sex not underscored by love, a sex that served only to negate rather than to affirm.

Both a life and a novel need a strong sense of values. I think this is what is missing in so much of contemporary life and fiction. I don’t mean values in a conservative, traditional sense, I mean values in the sense of something positive and life-affirming that lends lasting meaning. In “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction,”

Owen Yingling

says that “Something about literary fiction has changed in recent years that has put it off to mass audiences.” Likewise,

Naomi Kanakia

, in a piece about the general reader, describes a reader who’s “baffled” by all the discourse about the publishing industry, who simply reads “what they like”—and what they like often turns out to be “older books.”

I wonder if it’s because the newer books just don’t seem to be as meaningful. Characters in them lack a strong sense of their values, and they don’t commit. They exist in a perpetual confusion; they find it easy to reject what they don’t want but hard to accept or even know what they do want. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, young Stephen Dedalus rejects Ireland, the church, mother and father, but in passages of great beauty and transformation and joy, he exultantly discovers and affirms his purpose “to recreate life out of life,” to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.”

As I see it, the pillars that uphold the older classics are aesthetic beauty; a sense of moral wisdom; plots where actions and events feel significant, not arbitrary; characters who are real and fully fleshed, who dream and hope and strive and make you laugh and cry. It may be unfair of me to compare and contrast two such different books that came into my life together rather accidentally or uphold them as models of older and contemporary fiction. There are many contemporary novels like Acts of Service—Namwali Serpell rounds up at least ten of them that she dubs “remaster novels,” novels in which a young, powerless woman becomes involved with an older, powerful man who often has a shadowy wife lurking in the background. She traces their descent from Jane Eyre, but Jane and Rochester are both characters who have suffered, who know what they want and don’t want, who are real and passionate and see one another when others don’t. More than love or lust or a desire for security, Jane is led by her values: at a crucial moment, she chooses her self-respect over her love for Rochester, even if it leads her to abject poverty and begging.

One can have fun in a threesome, experiment, have a little adventure. But if I had to pick between the threesome and the stork, I’d throw my lot in with the stork. Lifting me up on its great broad wings, it might just take me somewhere.

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Dear Readers, I haven’t written a long essay like this in a while and found it really fun to write. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments—I always love hearing from you—and give this post a like, share with a friend, and subscribe to Soul-Making if you enjoyed!