“Mrs. Annie Simmons strutted down her front porch steps one May day butt naked except for a pair of high-heeled pink satin bedroom slippers and a short strand of coral-colored pop beads.” So begins the prologue that opens Fish Tales, and the initial parable that prepares an outline for the novel. On the open street Mrs. Simmons dances to soundless music, masturbates, and spits in her husband’s face. Lewis Jones, the protagonist of Fish Tales, witnesses this scene as a child. Twenty years later Lewis wanders the worlds of 1970s Detroit and New York, seeking love in men and other women. She’s often high. She’s often in a state of penetrating ecstasy. She’s often caught up in a violent rage.
Fish Tales is a burst of authentic energy, a rush of life from start to finish. The narrative follows Lewis from youth into her late thirties, her experiences linked together by a succession of lovers. Chapters are named after Lewis’ different companions, some lasting only a few pages while others can reach over one hundred. It’s a fascinating, messy life to follow, a chain of nights and rooms, lovers and trysts. The novel was originally conceived as a screenplay, which helps to explain the fast-moving vignette style. This form of storytelling, already at the edge of 1970s American film in movies such as Annie Hall and Nashville, becomes more avant-garde in textual form. It is no surprise that Fish Tales originally struggled to find publication.
The author of Fish Tales is Nettie Jones, an African American novelist whose manuscript was acquired by Toni Morrison. The book was originally published by Random House in 1984, and Jones was named as a promising new novelist by The New York Times. Fish Tales was read and commented on by a few critics, but then largely disappeared from the literary scene. Jones published her second and last novel, Mischief Makers, in 1989. In 2020, the ZORA Canon named Fish Tales one of the 100 greatest books ever written by African American women. Now in 2025, Fish Tales is finally receiving republication.
The first half of the story follows a succession of men and women in Lewis’ life, including homosexual hustler Kitty and Lewis’ husband Woody, who stands aside and supports Lewis in loving anyone she chooses. The second half focuses on one man, Brook, who becomes the center of Lewis’ attention. Brook is a handsome and snide quadriplegic, the target of a number of women’s affections. Lewis’ diverse affairs transition into a love for Brook, but this is not a story where “love wins”—Lewis and Brook’s arguments erupt into the violence and chaos that blazed in Lewis’ swinging days.
Allow a brief aside, with reference to the structure of the novel: there is an idea that the history of literature can be read as increasingly sophisticated depictions of human personality. This can be interpreted in the Bible, for instance, in the sense of that text as a foundational work of Western literature. Characterization begins with the largely blank Adam and Eve, through the increasingly individualized (though still crude) personalities of Genesis, to the focus on the mission-driven Moses of Exodus, then the complex history of King David. In the New Testament, this technique is crowned with the potential proposition of the ideal person, sketched in—endlessly cryptic—detail by Jesus. Western literature has continued to create increasingly detailed, psychologically comprehensive selves. Fish Tales reads in this pattern too, following Lewis’ experiences with men as fragments of personality floating in and out of the camera of narrative, before coming into extended focus with Brook.
Far-flung literary analysis aside, Fish Tales is best read, at least at first, as an experience. It is a unique adventure, unafraid to display the grittiness and brutal ecstasy of a life of fast liaisons. At the time of its original release Fish Tales was dismissed as smut by some readers. This is not accurate. The novel is about far more than the enjoyment of sex—it is about a sadness and pain that cannot be erased by bright city lights. It is a story of trauma, confusion, lost souls, and a wrathful love that may never know peace.
FICTION
Fish Tales
by Nettie Jones
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published April 15th, 2025
