The Fortress by S. A. Jones (Erewhon Books, 2020)
★★★★★
(content warning: rape, rape of children)
A high-powered male executive agrees to enter a woman-led society where, for one year, he will be forbidden to ask questions, to raise his hand in anger, or to refuse sex.
Wow, it’s been a while since I read a book that was this divisive on Goodreads. From the reviews, I judge that a significant number of people go into this book thinking it’s about female empowerment, when it’s… really not. It’s a book about men and what it takes to change the way men think and behave. In that, I think it succeeds wonderfully.
At the center of this question is Jonathon. Jonathon is mostly an asshole, but he does want to be a good father to his forthcoming child. He’s turned a blind eye to the sexual indiscretions at his firm, even participated in them, and it’s his wife’s discovery of the latter that prompts his voluntary atonement at The Fortress in lieu of divorce.
In the first few pages, we learn that Jonathon is the type of man who’s bothered by not being able to determine a person’s gender, who calls the junior analysts “poodles,” and who asks questions even when he’s been told not to. We all know a person like Jonathon. Jones knows that her reader is the type of person who will see these things as the forms of cis/hetero/male entitlement they are. What she’s asking is: can a man like this be redeemed?
Through flashbacks, we get glimpses of Jonathon’s life at the firm. We learn about the rape of one of his female colleagues at a holiday party, and the firm’s non-existent response. Though the incident unsettles him, Jonathon, with all his power, never takes action. He is not a person who can conceive of the world outside himself.
But at The Fortress, he’s made to do hard labor. He’s made to give and receive sexual acts he doesn’t want. He, the father-to-be, is made to endure the taunts and verbal abuses of one of The Fortress’s other inhabitants, a pedophile who’s been committed to The Fortress for raping three girls.
Which of these trials will lead Jonathon to depart himself? Will any?
I bought Jonathon’s character, and all the ways his environment tested it. (In this regard, very little was told, and I enjoyed the nuance Jones was able to bring to a particular look, or laugh.) I bought Jonathon’s resistance, his change, and the expression of that change when, in the novel’s denouement,
he agrees to have sex with a Vaik child (what he sees, and our society sees, as statutory rape—but what Vaik society sees as the child’s birthright). I read this as the moment where Jonathan, in becoming the thing he hates most, finally abdicates his ego.
A few other things I was glad to see:
Jonathon and his wife actually communicate about their marital problems, and their conflict is generally not a product of communicating poorly.
The pedophile character is given a compassionate and humanizing treatment.
Not a perfect book—I would have liked more from the other side characters—but I was along for the whole ride.