[ad_1]
RIPE, by Sarah Rose Etter
In Rachel Aviv’s “Strangers to Ourselves,” a woman describes mental health as “like your darkness is still there, but it’s almost like it’s next to you as opposed to your totality of being.”
That darkness — which could be labeled depression, anxiety or any number of official but imperfect diagnoses — is given a physical form in Sarah Rose Etter’s absorbing and sharp second novel, “Ripe.” The story follows Cassie, a 33-year-old tech employee in San Francisco who has lived all her life alongside a looming “black hole,” both a threat and a companion.
The black hole expands or shrinks, moves farther away or closer, is quiet or sings, depending on what Cassie is doing and how she’s feeling. When she’s high on cocaine, “it winnows to a speck.” On her commute to the Silicon Valley building where she works among “Believers” (her term for the all-in tech workers with their “wan skin and glassy eyes,” their “wind jackets with tech logos” and “white plastic airbuds” that “override the sound of real life”), the black hole grows, “blocking out the sun, forcing itself into the scenes of my life.” When the chef Cassie is dating says they need to talk, “the black hole swelled to the size of a melon.”
Cassie has spent years researching black holes in an attempt to understand her own. She reads books, studies and news articles, and relates the resulting information to the reader like a notebook, interspersing the text with paragraphs of binary code, bulleted facts, headlines and quotes from astrophysicists. Her research is driven by a fearful curiosity that sometimes sucks away all her joy, and yet she is lured by its call: The black hole “is the siren song of the void.”
Eventually Cassie determines that there are “two possible outcomes if you enter a black hole: You may be ripped to shreds, or there is a slim chance you will cross into another space and time, another dimension.” Hovering over the novel are the questions: What happens on the other side of this darkness, and under what conditions is it worth finding out?
Cassie’s conditions might exemplify those of modern American — or perhaps uniquely Silicon Valley — success. She made it out of her “dying” East Coast town, went to college, got decent jobs, moved out West and, as her father puts it, is “playing the game.” For the majority of the book, she works as the head marketing writer for a start-up valued at $16 billion. She’s able to live in a San Francisco apartment that costs $3,000 a month.
But beneath the gleaming surface exists a “deafening river of melancholy roaring through the dark red cave of my heart.” Her workplace is toxic, her bosses abusive. She depends on drugs to persist and can barely afford her living costs. Her few meaningful relationships are often heartbreaking, like the one with her father. A global virus and wildfires are spreading. Each day she is witness to the suffering in this “city of extremes” — men setting themselves on fire, unhoused people defecating on the street, women passed out in public with bloody feet: “With each horror, a new slit is cut into my brain.”
There is a long history of sad girls and women in literature; think novels by Jean Rhys, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath. In the last decade or so, the “sad girl” moniker has gained traction through popular, and predominantly white, media (and social media) — musicians like Lana Del Rey, Phoebe Bridgers and Billie Eilish; TV shows like “Fleabag” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”; books like “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” “So Sad Today” (and its namesake Twitter account) and Sally Rooney’s entire oeuvre. In 2014 the artist and book critic Audrey Wollen proposed a “Sad Girl Theory,” the idea that by enacting their sorrow, women are subverting systems of power. “I believe those girls have the power to cause real upheaval, to really change things,” Wollen said in an interview with Vice.
Cassie might seem like a high-functioning sad girl, able to accomplish her day-to-day job, but she does so with a great deal of shame and misery. “To survive here, I have split myself in two,” she says, and some of the most genuinely unsettling moments of the novel are when we watch Cassie toggle between the “fake self” who performs almost too well at work — she proposes immoral but highly praised ideas in company meetings; she tricks someone into an exploitative job — and the roiling anguish of her “real self,” mired in the dystopia of late capitalism.
Etter expertly diverts the novel from neat or didactic tropes. While Cassie does resist the powers that be in small ways — attending a rent protest, refusing to wear company swag — she mainly continues to live with her two selves, until an unforgettable ending. The upheaval of the book is largely internal, but no less moving. Through Cassie’s personal history and relationships — with her parents, with the chef, with her pseudo-friends in San Francisco — Etter accomplishes what we seek in fiction: a deeply human connection.
“Ripe” can feel repetitive (almost every other chapter begins with a dictionary-style definition of such terms as “ergosphere,” “outer horizon” and even “motivation”), but Etter’s exquisite prose powers the book. There are also moments when one wishes that Cassie might seek more connection with others, might reflect a bit more deeply about those around her. However, Etter doesn’t grant us such easy ways out. Sometimes embracing the darkness is the only way to get through it.
Alexandra Chang is the author of “Days of Distraction.” Her next novel, “Tomb Sweeping,” will be published in August.
RIPE | By Sarah Rose Etter | 276 pp. | Scribner | $25
[ad_2]
Source link
