Fishbowl by Bradley Somer

Published by St. Martin's Press on August 4, 2015

Fishbowl is "a glimpse into the box" that is called the Seville on Roxy. The box contains "the perpetual presence of life itself."

We are told in chapter 2 that Ian the goldfish will plunge from a 27th floor balcony in chapter 54. We are also told that Troy the snail, who stays safely in the bowl, lives the kind of uneventful life that usually assures dull longevity, while Ian is an adventurer who has always yearned to go beyond the limits of his fishbowl. Is it better to die as "an old fish without one adventure had"? Of course not. Ian is no snail.

The story's main characters are people, which is fortunate since Ian, while a pleasant goldfish, doesn't have much personality. Katie is Connor Radley's girlfriend. Katie falls in love quickly and often, usually with the wrong men. Connor clearly falls into the "bad boyfriend" category, as most of his multiple sex partners understand, but maybe he has unmined depths. Or maybe not.

Conner lives in the Seville, as do the other main characters: Jiminez the super, Petunia Delilah the pregnant woman who is about to give birth, Garth the construction worker who can't wait to transform himself with the contents of a mysterious package, Claire the "aggressively introverted" (not to say agoraphobic) shut-in who gets paid for phone sex, and Homeschooled Herman who suffers from blackouts that he regards as proof of teleportation and time travel.

The main characters are tied together not just by their residence in Seville but by the failure of both elevators to function properly for the half hour during which the story takes place. In a series of short chapters, the narrative jumps from character to character (including, occasionally, Ian). As Ian falls, we are treated to brief descriptions of the lives of apartment dwellers (main characters and others) as he plunges past their windows.

The Seville is a building full of lonely people who, in different ways, don't quite know how to connect with the world. Some of them become a little less lonely by the novel's end. Others become a little lonelier but they learn about themselves in the process. Some learn that overcoming loneliness requires "an uncomfortable exposure to let oneself be true in the presence of another."

The characters are all struggling to give definition to their lives. They want to be happy. They aren't certain how to accomplish that end but they know that things need to change. To a large extent, Fishbowl is about finding the courage to change a life, to find yourself while finding the freedom to be yourself.

The story is very funny but it is also sweet and occasionally touching in ways that are both genuine and original. It is also a smart and insightful look at how people can have multiple identities at the same time, each of them real, all of them assembling into a complicated and contradictory whole. Fishbowl is a wonderful novel of birth and death and everything in between, all revealed in a thirty minute glimpse into a box that "fills up with infinitely thin layers of experience," layers so thin that there will always be room for the box to hold an infinity of new and eventful experiences as its residents live their separate lives together.

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