Docile by K.M. Szpara
Nov. 2nd, 2021 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleI read Docile by K.M. Szpara yesterday. This post is about the problems with the book because I've been thinking about them and writing about them is how I work them out in my head; however, I also need to say that I could not put it down and skipped doing some other things I would normally have done yesterday in favor of continuing on with the book.
Content notes straight from the book itself: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape, abuse, and other consent violations, as well as attempted suicide and suicidal ideation.
Book description from the publisher:
The book description does not do a very good job of preparing you for the actual plot of the book. The book, where we get both Alex and Elisha's points of view, basically weaves together three different kinds of stories I was familiar with:
When Elisha refuses Dociline, which he can do because one of the seven Rights granted to Dociles is to ask for or refuse Dociline, he does so in public, at Alex's birthday party on the first night he's Alex's Docile. Alex took a Docile in the first place because his father, and therefore the company's board, said he had to either get married or take a Docile to prove that he's worthy of continuing to run the company, so having his Docile refuse Dociline is a big deal. There's a second incident of Elisha embarrassing Alex by the standards of the trillionaires. They're at Mariah's annual giant costume party where part of the entertainment is that Dociles are either sexually servicing party guests or involved in an orgy for the guests entertainment. Dutch has Elisha suck him off; he pulls out at the end and tells Elisha to wear it, but Elisha pushes him away so he comes on the floor instead of on Elisha. As punishment, Elisha has to lick it up from the floor. Elisha is also sent into the orgy pit with Onyx, one of Dutch's Dociles, and they have sex, which Elisha is very uncomfortable with because of the consent issues of Onyx being on Dociline.
At six months, Elisha goes home for his family visit (Dociles get one every six months). It does not go well; he is too much of a Docile, and his father ultimately tells him to get out. He walks a ways up the road to a place where he can call Alex, and Alex comes to get him.
Alex takes Elisha for a romantic night at a hotel, which the tabloids publish pictures of, causing a huge scandal. Alex then goes on a date with Javier, the guy he broke up with before the book started that was the catalyst for his father requiring him to get engaged or take on a Docile. Elisha is practicing piano when Javier arrives, stop playing when he gets there, and then, because he's jealous, plays a chord that interrupts them. When they get back later, Javier binds Elisha's hands behind him, gags him, and puts him into the confinement box. Elisha assumes this is how Alex is punishing him; Alex only finds out about it in the morning, after which he throws Javier out. He also decides this is too much and he takes Elisha home. Elisha doesn't want to be anywhere but with Alex, but Alex makes him sign something that says his debt is paid for, he no longer has to be a Docile, and Alex will continue paying his family a stipend.
Elisha is a mess, and no one in his family or community really knows how to help him. He attempts suicide, but accidentally calls Alex - he says something like, "I can't call Alex," and the voice-activated phone Alex gave him to put in the roof of his mouth calls Alex - who sneaks out of the interviews with new potential Dociles and goes to take care of him.
This is really where the legal thriller piece begins. Alex's father has him declared incompetent and sues Elisha and his family on Alex's behalf claiming that Elisha targeted Alex and seduced him into paying his family's debt. We find out that Dutch is the primary funder behind Empower Maryland and his Dociles, Opal and Onyx, are only pretending to be on Dociline, and they're actually in a polyamorous V relationship. Dutch becomes a sort of go-between, getting Elisha connected with Empower Maryland to help him heal and defend the lawsuit and helping Alex get Elisha's family to the city and find an off-the-books space they can use to draw blood from Elisha's mom so Alex and Jess can work on an antidote to Dociline. Alex and Elisha have told each other they love each other, and they keep wanting to be together even though they both know to some degree that their relationship is really unhealthy.
I had some reservations about the writing of the first part of the book when I was reading it, but it really started to show how much it didn't work once we get to the legal thriller part. The position Elisha's lawyers take is that Alex deliberately brainwashed him, so he definitely couldn't have planned to get extra money or freedom from Alex. The biggest problem with this is that we didn't see enough of Elisha's transformation. We don't know him for long enough before he becomes a Docile to see how different he is after. There are a handful of time skips on the order of a month or two, so we don't see the slide into being what Alex wants him to be. Alex says in court that he deliberately set rules and punishments for Elisha to get Elisha to be the perfect Docile, but in the early part of the book when we see things from his perspective, he seems very uncertain about what he's doing and seems to be flying by the seat of his pants. It also seemed really clear to me as a reader that he had no idea how much he was building Elisha into the boyfriend he wanted him to be rather than a simply obedient Docile.
As part of Elisha's healing, Onyx takes him under his wing a bit. When they talk about the time they had sex, Elisha said he had nightmares about it for weeks after it. We saw him have nightmares after the party, but it wasn't at all clear that his nightmares were about the consent issues of having sex with Onyx; I assumed it was about the horror of the whole situation of the party, and in particular the encounter with Dutch. It's unclear if Onyx has ever been a Docile on Dociline, and I had questions about what he's basing his approach to helping Elisha on. He does take Elisha to pick out clothes and encourages him to choose whatever he wants; one of the things Elisha chooses is a pair of leggings because, as we saw at some earlier parts of the book, he likes the security of tight clothes. At one point, Onyx tells Elisha he knows something that will help, and he gives Elisha traffic light safewords and spanks him. Elisha loves it and feels really good afterwards. He asks Onyx to hurt him again later, and that time Onyx says that while he and Dutch have clear rules about being able to fuck other people, he's not going to help Elisha cheat and he needs to talk to Alex first. Elisha breaks up with Alex, and then he and Onyx have sex again, with a very clear discussion of limits and wants, where Onyx ties Elisha up, spanks him, and fucks him. This is another place where the early part of the book left me with a lot of questions. Are we supposed to think that Elisha is a sub and discovered it through what he did with Alex, or are we supposed to think that Elisha is only a sub due to Alex's conditioning? Why would Onyx think spanking him would help in the first place? Is this supposed to be a kink-norm world? None of these questions are really answered by the text.
The previous two points are where I expect part of my reading is influenced by having read a lot of fan fic. I think that if the book were fan fic, not only would we have a better idea about the characters to begin with, but also we would have either gotten so much more of the training portion of the story so what happens later would make more sense. I heard an interview with Szpara where he talks about how he wouldn't write a sequel but he would be into curtain fic about Alex and Elisha, which makes me think he probably knows about fan fic. The other possible way to fix the book without delving deeper into the training portion would have been to cut it into distinct sections so the time skips happen between sections where it makes more sense for us to have not seen what happens in them. Cutting it into sections also would have made the turn into legal thriller seem less like a sudden change.
The other, more nitpicky, issue I had with the book as a whole was that the worldbuilding wasn't always clear in a way that seemed like the author only knows about one city and state and didn't stop to really think about how it would read to people who aren't familiar with that state and city. I didn't get at the beginning that the ODR is a Maryland state department and not a federal department. It becomes clearer when there's some discussion about California moving toward using Dociline and the possibility of Europe starting to use it, but I think having it be a state department really changes my view of it. The next of kin laws, which mean that debt gets inherited, appear to be federal, and possibly something many other countries have also done. But if different states deal with debtors differently, then why don't people move states to ones that deal with them more favorably? Are they so beaten down by debt that they can't imagine any other possibilities? Do they not have the money to move? Are their communities too important for them to leave? Are they even allowed to move? There are also references to the city and how Elisha comes from the counties. I had a hard time parsing this - aren't cities also in counties? - until I realized that the city is Baltimore, and then it made more sense to me only because I've read most of Laura Lippman's Baltimore-set mysteries where there's a clear distinction between the city cops and the county cops.
In the end, Alex is fired and disowned by his family and Elisha and his family are living in the city. Alex says that he wants to start a clinic to help people like Elisha's mom who are still under the effects of Dociline after it's supposed to wear off. Elisha tells him to start his clinic and they can check back in about their personal relationship in a while.
In addition to the things I've already said about where I think the writing could have been better, I also think it could have been better marketed. The legal thriller aspect seemed to come out of nowhere. I didn't find myself seduced - the sex scenes are all done for plot reasons in a way that they don't feel hot - and the only way I was startled was by the legal thriller aspect, which is probably not what they meant when they said the book startles. And yet, as I said at the beginning, I couldn't put the book down.
Content notes straight from the book itself: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape, abuse, and other consent violations, as well as attempted suicide and suicidal ideation.
Book description from the publisher:
There is no consent under capitalism
K. M. Szpara's Docile is a science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power, a challenging tour de force that at turns seduces and startles.
To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents' debts and buy your children's future.
Elisha Wilder's family has been ruined by debt, handed down to them from previous generations. His mother never recovered from the Dociline she took during her term as a Docile, so when Elisha decides to try and erase the family's debt himself, he swears he will never take the drug that took his mother from him. Too bad his contract has been purchased by Alexander Bishop III, whose ultra-rich family is the brains (and money) behind Dociline and the entire Office of Debt Resolution. When Elisha refuses Dociline, Alex refuses to believe that his family's crowning achievement could have any negative side effects—and is determined to turn Elisha into the perfect Docile without it.
The book description does not do a very good job of preparing you for the actual plot of the book. The book, where we get both Alex and Elisha's points of view, basically weaves together three different kinds of stories I was familiar with:
- A world where there is state-organized slavery, including sex slavery, as a way of paying off debt. Probably there is other fiction about this; the place I have encountered it is in fan fiction. (This will be relevant later.)
- A person who is high up in the power structure gets involved with someone at the bottom who they have specific as well as societal power over and realizes both that the oppressed people are people and that they are contributing to a deeply harmful and unjust society. I'm most familiar with this in fantasy novels.
- A legal thriller. This was the part that the book description least prepares you for, and in some ways it's the part the whole story hinges around. This element of the book made more sense when I got to the about the author and learned that Szpara is a paralegal in his day job.
When Elisha refuses Dociline, which he can do because one of the seven Rights granted to Dociles is to ask for or refuse Dociline, he does so in public, at Alex's birthday party on the first night he's Alex's Docile. Alex took a Docile in the first place because his father, and therefore the company's board, said he had to either get married or take a Docile to prove that he's worthy of continuing to run the company, so having his Docile refuse Dociline is a big deal. There's a second incident of Elisha embarrassing Alex by the standards of the trillionaires. They're at Mariah's annual giant costume party where part of the entertainment is that Dociles are either sexually servicing party guests or involved in an orgy for the guests entertainment. Dutch has Elisha suck him off; he pulls out at the end and tells Elisha to wear it, but Elisha pushes him away so he comes on the floor instead of on Elisha. As punishment, Elisha has to lick it up from the floor. Elisha is also sent into the orgy pit with Onyx, one of Dutch's Dociles, and they have sex, which Elisha is very uncomfortable with because of the consent issues of Onyx being on Dociline.
At six months, Elisha goes home for his family visit (Dociles get one every six months). It does not go well; he is too much of a Docile, and his father ultimately tells him to get out. He walks a ways up the road to a place where he can call Alex, and Alex comes to get him.
Alex takes Elisha for a romantic night at a hotel, which the tabloids publish pictures of, causing a huge scandal. Alex then goes on a date with Javier, the guy he broke up with before the book started that was the catalyst for his father requiring him to get engaged or take on a Docile. Elisha is practicing piano when Javier arrives, stop playing when he gets there, and then, because he's jealous, plays a chord that interrupts them. When they get back later, Javier binds Elisha's hands behind him, gags him, and puts him into the confinement box. Elisha assumes this is how Alex is punishing him; Alex only finds out about it in the morning, after which he throws Javier out. He also decides this is too much and he takes Elisha home. Elisha doesn't want to be anywhere but with Alex, but Alex makes him sign something that says his debt is paid for, he no longer has to be a Docile, and Alex will continue paying his family a stipend.
Elisha is a mess, and no one in his family or community really knows how to help him. He attempts suicide, but accidentally calls Alex - he says something like, "I can't call Alex," and the voice-activated phone Alex gave him to put in the roof of his mouth calls Alex - who sneaks out of the interviews with new potential Dociles and goes to take care of him.
This is really where the legal thriller piece begins. Alex's father has him declared incompetent and sues Elisha and his family on Alex's behalf claiming that Elisha targeted Alex and seduced him into paying his family's debt. We find out that Dutch is the primary funder behind Empower Maryland and his Dociles, Opal and Onyx, are only pretending to be on Dociline, and they're actually in a polyamorous V relationship. Dutch becomes a sort of go-between, getting Elisha connected with Empower Maryland to help him heal and defend the lawsuit and helping Alex get Elisha's family to the city and find an off-the-books space they can use to draw blood from Elisha's mom so Alex and Jess can work on an antidote to Dociline. Alex and Elisha have told each other they love each other, and they keep wanting to be together even though they both know to some degree that their relationship is really unhealthy.
I had some reservations about the writing of the first part of the book when I was reading it, but it really started to show how much it didn't work once we get to the legal thriller part. The position Elisha's lawyers take is that Alex deliberately brainwashed him, so he definitely couldn't have planned to get extra money or freedom from Alex. The biggest problem with this is that we didn't see enough of Elisha's transformation. We don't know him for long enough before he becomes a Docile to see how different he is after. There are a handful of time skips on the order of a month or two, so we don't see the slide into being what Alex wants him to be. Alex says in court that he deliberately set rules and punishments for Elisha to get Elisha to be the perfect Docile, but in the early part of the book when we see things from his perspective, he seems very uncertain about what he's doing and seems to be flying by the seat of his pants. It also seemed really clear to me as a reader that he had no idea how much he was building Elisha into the boyfriend he wanted him to be rather than a simply obedient Docile.
As part of Elisha's healing, Onyx takes him under his wing a bit. When they talk about the time they had sex, Elisha said he had nightmares about it for weeks after it. We saw him have nightmares after the party, but it wasn't at all clear that his nightmares were about the consent issues of having sex with Onyx; I assumed it was about the horror of the whole situation of the party, and in particular the encounter with Dutch. It's unclear if Onyx has ever been a Docile on Dociline, and I had questions about what he's basing his approach to helping Elisha on. He does take Elisha to pick out clothes and encourages him to choose whatever he wants; one of the things Elisha chooses is a pair of leggings because, as we saw at some earlier parts of the book, he likes the security of tight clothes. At one point, Onyx tells Elisha he knows something that will help, and he gives Elisha traffic light safewords and spanks him. Elisha loves it and feels really good afterwards. He asks Onyx to hurt him again later, and that time Onyx says that while he and Dutch have clear rules about being able to fuck other people, he's not going to help Elisha cheat and he needs to talk to Alex first. Elisha breaks up with Alex, and then he and Onyx have sex again, with a very clear discussion of limits and wants, where Onyx ties Elisha up, spanks him, and fucks him. This is another place where the early part of the book left me with a lot of questions. Are we supposed to think that Elisha is a sub and discovered it through what he did with Alex, or are we supposed to think that Elisha is only a sub due to Alex's conditioning? Why would Onyx think spanking him would help in the first place? Is this supposed to be a kink-norm world? None of these questions are really answered by the text.
The previous two points are where I expect part of my reading is influenced by having read a lot of fan fic. I think that if the book were fan fic, not only would we have a better idea about the characters to begin with, but also we would have either gotten so much more of the training portion of the story so what happens later would make more sense. I heard an interview with Szpara where he talks about how he wouldn't write a sequel but he would be into curtain fic about Alex and Elisha, which makes me think he probably knows about fan fic. The other possible way to fix the book without delving deeper into the training portion would have been to cut it into distinct sections so the time skips happen between sections where it makes more sense for us to have not seen what happens in them. Cutting it into sections also would have made the turn into legal thriller seem less like a sudden change.
The other, more nitpicky, issue I had with the book as a whole was that the worldbuilding wasn't always clear in a way that seemed like the author only knows about one city and state and didn't stop to really think about how it would read to people who aren't familiar with that state and city. I didn't get at the beginning that the ODR is a Maryland state department and not a federal department. It becomes clearer when there's some discussion about California moving toward using Dociline and the possibility of Europe starting to use it, but I think having it be a state department really changes my view of it. The next of kin laws, which mean that debt gets inherited, appear to be federal, and possibly something many other countries have also done. But if different states deal with debtors differently, then why don't people move states to ones that deal with them more favorably? Are they so beaten down by debt that they can't imagine any other possibilities? Do they not have the money to move? Are their communities too important for them to leave? Are they even allowed to move? There are also references to the city and how Elisha comes from the counties. I had a hard time parsing this - aren't cities also in counties? - until I realized that the city is Baltimore, and then it made more sense to me only because I've read most of Laura Lippman's Baltimore-set mysteries where there's a clear distinction between the city cops and the county cops.
In the end, Alex is fired and disowned by his family and Elisha and his family are living in the city. Alex says that he wants to start a clinic to help people like Elisha's mom who are still under the effects of Dociline after it's supposed to wear off. Elisha tells him to start his clinic and they can check back in about their personal relationship in a while.
In addition to the things I've already said about where I think the writing could have been better, I also think it could have been better marketed. The legal thriller aspect seemed to come out of nowhere. I didn't find myself seduced - the sex scenes are all done for plot reasons in a way that they don't feel hot - and the only way I was startled was by the legal thriller aspect, which is probably not what they meant when they said the book startles. And yet, as I said at the beginning, I couldn't put the book down.