A few years ago I joined an online book club run by a local bookshop. I struggled to keep on top of the reading and had to cancel my membership, guiltily putting aside the last few books to read later. Every book choice was thought provoking and came from a small publisher so it was totally up my street; it was just the wrong timing for me.

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter was one of those book club picks, which I’ve now finally read. It’s an intense satire of Silicon Valley. I both loved it and found it stressful to read.

On paper, Cassie is living the dream, with an apartment in a nice San Francisco neighbourhood and an impressive-sounding job at a unicorn start-up. But her depression is a black hole that threatens to overwhelm her; work hours and pressure are overwhelming; and her finances are precarious. She’s taking a lot of coke and plastering on a fake smile to survive.

The black hole as a metaphor for depression is underlined by Cassie’s personal obsession with black-hole facts. She also has an obsession with pomegranates – that classic symbol of temptation. California’s famous ripeness and abundance is seductive. Cassie is from middle America – I forget whether a specific place is named, but she was certainly drawn to the glamour of San Francisco. And in her frequent phone calls with her parents she is reluctant to admit it’s so far from living up to expectations.

“There are moments of beauty and light. It would be a lie to say it is all dread here. Even an oil spill has a rainbow sheen, an iridescent shimmer that trembles over its darkness. Life is this way, too: half suffering, half beauty.”

As well as work and money, Cassie is sleeping with a man who already has a girlfriend and she fears she might be pregnant. And just to add one more worry, this novel is set in 2020 so in the background is Covid. From the earliest chapters, Cassie reads news stories about the virus and raises concerns at her workplace, which are dismissed to the point of gaslighting.

“All of this information rushes in, all the terror of the new day. The world is distant and at the same time right on top of me, on top of us, its knife at our throats. We are everywhere all at once all of the time now. We are digital witnesses to each other’s tragedies. The black hole dilates in response to the news, as if we both know the virus is on the horizon, picking up velocity, aiming directly for us, the future not a bright light but a bullet.”

This is really well written but also very dark. On the second page, Cassie sees a man set himself on fire. We later learn this was not the first time. A homeless man lives on her doorstep. The glaring inequality of San Francisco is very much part of Cassie’s inner conflict.

But let’s face it – it’s mostly about her terrible workplace. They demand long hours, evenings and weekends, complex last-minute assignments – and berate Cassie for not doing the impossible. And all for a wage that barely covers rent in a half-decent San Francisco neighbourhood. There are cheaper areas, but Cassie fears being judged by the “believers” – the people she sees everywhere who have swallowed the dream wholesale. She’s already afraid they will discover she shops at the cheap grocery story.

I honestly found this book anxiety-inducing. I can well believe that this is how many companies operate, deliberately keeping their employees on a knife edge. It’s horrible and it’s fervent ground for fiction.

Published 2023 by Verve Books.

Source: Good Book Club