Fruit Fly by Josh Silver: book review

Fruit Fly by Josh Silver

Here's the thing about the hyped books of 2026—they're incredibly readable, and that must be their main appeal. Because I haven't found them to be of stunningly great quality beyond my slight bewilderment at how I managed to turn the pages so quickly without particularly enjoying myself. 

And I say all this having been incredibly excited about Fruit Fly. To the point that I had to sit on my hands to stop myself from buying it before my library hold came in. The premise is fascinating. The novel promises to be about a washed-up author who steals the life story of a man that she meets on the street to write her new novel. She capitalizes on his story, writing about a gay, homeless man struggling with drug addiction who uses sex work to get by—in the crude publishing speak that's laced through the novel, trendy. After a chance meeting with Leo, her new muse, Mallory, the author, spends most of her time trying to follow Leo around to get material for her book. Sometimes, she just stalks him the old fashion way. When that's not enough, she enters a strange therapeutic relationship to directly extract stories for her novel because, conveniently, Mallory has become a cut-rate councilor in the years since her writing career dried up. For most of the book, Leo hatches plans to try to survive, and Mallory copies them down into her future bestseller, but as the book progresses, we learn more about Mallory's abusive husband who tries to keep her locked in the house and how she is just as desperate for an escape hatch as Leo, which is maybe why she's so drawn to him in the first place. 

All the ingredients of an interesting, twisty novel that could have a lot to say are present. I love a good commentary on the publishing industry. It is so easy to parody. The premise instantly brings to mind RF Kuang's book Yellowface, a precursor in the niche genre of publishing satire. And the first half of the book finds similar pitfalls to Kuang's, namely, in an attempt to use a character to make a point, stripping them of all human qualities to turn them into a cartoon, makes them much less compelling to read about. Why do I care what happens to this random, flat, bad person? There seems to be, in Yesteryear as well, a trend in forgetting that even if you want to make an example of someone in a first person narrative, there has to be some point of understanding with the main character. As the cliche goes, every villain is the hero of their own story. 

Now, Silver does seem to realize this a ways into his novel where Mallory's husband's strange abuse becomes more obvious. He moves from being condescending and very strangely aggressive about talking about having children for a man who also believes his wife is mentally unstable and potentially a danger to herself to becoming obviously abusive, trying to get her committed to the hospital for no reason, taking away her phone, and making her delete her manuscript when he discovers what she's started writing. This does humanize Mallory, to a degree, and it provides her with a somewhat understandable motivation for taking advantage of Leo—not right by any means but suddenly more plausible, more interesting. She needs the advance money to get out. Suddenly, there's a gesture at stakes.

The problem is that the execution, especially of Mallory's chapters, is extremely questionable at best. Much like how I felt about Yesteryear, the quality of the writing felt entirely divorced from the amount of hype surrounding it. While Leo's chapters played around with voice in an interesting way that felt compelling, grounded, and true to character, Mallory's chapters were full of cardboard supporting characters and wooden dialogue. The most generous read is that Mallory's voice is meant to echo that she's a terrible writer and a fraud. She can't even think with any eloquence. But that doesn't negate the fact that everything said to her also sounds like a poorly scripted television show. Her husband, Ronan, has a one track mind, a habit of overstating everything as a way to info-dump to the readers, and not a single inch of depth. All he wants is to force Mallory to torpedo her career and have a baby. He is so incredibly one-note it almost completely dulls the impact of how horrible these people are. In a turn that is not very literary, I've seen a trend with a lot of this year's books that equate a character being a "bad" person with having to render them completely flatly. The writing in her POV chapters was just so elementary. From reading Leo's chapters, I know that Silver is capable of being far more interested in voice, world building, and character, but Leo, half-baked in his own ways, can't save the novel. 

What makes the novel work compelling is that the generally basic construction makes it an incredibly fast read and the whiplash jumble of events, though they do end up repeating themselves after a while, does make you want to keep turning the pages. The chapters are generally short and feature emails and text messages often, making them even easier to skim. For a book that is meant to be thought-provoking, I almost felt I was being begged to skim as the descriptions rarely held much substance. While the conceit of the book is fantastic and there is a sort of action-movie quality to the unfolding of the ridiculous events, I just didn't find the execution to be there, and the book honestly felt like it was confused itself at times about how to hold all the strands at once. Silver introduces many interesting glimmers into the text that are forgotten or end up pulverized in the blender of the overall novel. A more attentive editorial hand at some point in the process could've gone a long way for this novel, though I guess the book does make the point that this is no longer the main interest of publishing.

There were also a number of strange inconsistencies like Stan, the editor-in-chief of the publishing house that Mallory reaches out to because she's been dropped by her agent. But then as the novel progresses, it feels more like Stan is her agent. He finds her an editor that might take the manuscript, but then she doesn't like the ending and doesn't want to take it. They make changes to appease this editor, and it's never mentioned why Stan doesn't just acquire the book himself or push it through as he would, presumably, have more power in this situation than the junior editor. Even Leo is sending him material by the end, which Stan happily gives feedback on—to an unagented writer he has no relationship with—without batting an eye. Much like how the formatting of the text messages were backwards from the way you'd expect them to be based on experience with using a phone—outgoing on the right, incoming on the left—they are things that pulled me out of the novel but aren't major issues. It just served to compound the general lack of attention to the product of a cohesive novel that the book radiated.

I think my biggest disappointments here were things that could've been pushed further. I wanted to know more about Leo's poetry page beyond the few poems we see. I wanted more depth and less filler for both Leo and Mallory because Silver does present enough glimmers of substance that I can see the potential, which makes it even more frustrating. 

Of all the books from this year that I'd consider overhyped, I'd say I'm most supportive of this novel and its underdog story creating huge buzz in America off its UK release where it's certainly already outsold its advance and probably will by a very large factor once the publisher can print enough to keep up with the demand. 

I really wanted to love this one, but I think it just didn't end up being for me, even though there were moments I definitely enjoyed. 

Overall: 3