About midway through Sarah Rose Etter’s novel, “Ripe,” main character Cassie pauses amid her depression and anxiety to consider a mountain of snow in the parking lot of the Silicon Valley startup where she works. Her boss, a nameless, fleece-wearing commander referred to only as “the CEO,” has delivered this summertime miracle as a gift to his employees.
“There are moments of beauty and light,” Cassie says. “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.”
The summer snow is wondrous, she admits. But nearly everything else about Cassie’s young adulthood is complicated, toxic or just plain bleak. At work, she feels trapped inside a corporate nightmare, where nothing she does is good enough. At home, her rent keeps rising, and she struggles to understand the extreme levels of wealth and poverty that surround her. In between, she goes out with fake friends and a boyfriend who won’t fully commit. Her constant companion is a miniature black hole that grows or shrinks depending on her mood. And then — oh, yeah — there’s a pandemic on the way.
“Ripe” is another in the ever-growing line of quarter-life-crisis novels. But Etter’s writing shines with a desolate intensity that’s somewhere between fever dream and panic attack. A remarkable, if unsettling, journey.
