Description:
Cassie's living in San Francisco, working in Silicon Valley, nursing an expanding black hole and a potential baby.

Liked:
Oppressive and engaging. The people around Cassie are painted with just enough nuance and inherent contradiction to make them interesting (at least, mostly). As a portrait of a woman caught in a bad situation, it felt convincing. There are some lovely, understated but quietly devastating turns of phrase.

Disliked:
Silicion Valley was caricaturised to the extent that it made the protagonist's struggles feel less brutally banal. The insistence on marking certain folks out as 'believers' feels puerile, and even though this easy dichotomy is slightly challenged, it's not called out enough to forgive its initial usage. A couple of irritating conceits distracted from the quality of the prose in general: I wasn't into the dictionary definitions, and it seems like even the author grew bored of Cassie's penchant for listing things.

Would recommend; despite the irritations, it's well written and compelling.

Devoured this in one evening. Absolutely beautifully written, with a suffocating and intense depiction of mental health and pressure. Looking forward to seeing more titles from Sarah Rose Etter!

The American Dream - get a job, pay your taxes, work yourself to death and if you’re lucky get two weeks of a year.

With Ripe, Etter is unwavering in the picture she paints with crystalline precision of the abject failure of modern life, the nuclear family and the insatiable desire of capitalism.

The toxic workplace culture that seemed so alien to myself in Europe many years ago is slowly leaking across the pond so whilst this feels like everyday life for those trying to survive - it feels like a warning to the rest of us.

Ripe covers a great deal of ground in just over 200 pages and almost nothing feels superfluous. I’m sure I’m likely alone in this but the addition of a growing and mysterious pandemic to the story felt unnecessary and given the short time that had elapsed since our shared experience of this it didn’t feel exactly do anything but take up room.

4.5 stars

Ohh this book had me hooked straight away! The writing was so addictive and I love how the author described certain feelings and pain we all go through. Will definitely be reading more by this author

I'm right behind Etter's politicised depiction of late-stage western capitalism but one of the problems about depicting the mind-set of a narrator who is almost spiritually paralysed is that the book doesn't - can't -go anywhere as Cassie is the metaphorical hamster on the wheel, pedalling and pedalling to infinity.

What I like about this is the exposure of the fall-out of where we are: the yawning equality gap as zombie-like Believers travel to and from meaningless Silicon Valley tech jobs while the victims of capitalism are homeless and on the streets, washing in the lake outside Cassie's office window and killing themselves through self-immolation.

But much of this has been done before with greater literary aplomb: Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation for one, which somehow managed to make spiritual ennui laceratingly funny and eventful.

Here the toxic work colleagues are almost cartoonish in their one-dimensional awfulness, and it's hard to get a precise handle on Cassie herself: she's anxious and depressed yet she seems to be a whizz at her job; she senior enough to be writing top-level industry reports and plotting in the CEO's sabotage team, yet she's somehow also limp and subservient and a victim. I guess that Etter is trying to show how the dynamics of capitalism grind down even the bright and anyone with a soupcon of ethics but it's all rather crudely done without much nuance.

Similarly, the metaphor of Cassie's anxiety/incipient depression is figured as a black hole *on every page*, sometimes multiple times on the page, as it follows her around, growing and shrinking, and almost becoming an entity in its own right. Which would be fine but the overkill rubbed me up the wrong way.

The only choice that Cassie ever makes is also a cliché - how many more books are going to follow this trajectory, however important the issue in real life?

There's an unfinished feel to the pomegranate theme which appears to be important enough to feature on the front cover: I assumed this is gesturing to a Persephone link (in the classical myth Persephone is abducted by Pluto into the underworld, eats some pomegranate seeds there and is forced to spend half her time in the underworld, half her time above ground - it's a seasonal fertility myth) but it doesn't really make much sense as Cassie may be in a capitalist hell but it's not a rotating one.

Great ending, though! And I should say that though I started skimming a bit, I did read this to the finish. Ultimately, I think this is part of an increasing literary resistance to the 'corporate growth/capitalism is the only way' narrative that we are still being fed in the face of yawning gaps between the haves and have-nots, and the deadening of the qualities which make us human, putting us in thrall to meaningless labour just to keep the system turning over. That's great but as a piece of creative fiction this feels less sharp and productive than I'd have liked.

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter is a painfully sad novel that captures what it's like to suffer from depression and anxiety and how that can be compounded by how you feel at work.