Ripe for Review

🗓 posted Dec 06, 2024 by Josh Erb
🔢 496 words
🏷

My library card back in D.C. hasn't expired yet. This means that I am still getting a slow trickle of notifications for e-book holds that I placed a few months ago and forgot about. I wasn't sure this would work while abroad, given I'm loading them up on my e-reader from an ISP clearly based in India, but — miracle of miracles — I have confirmed that I can check these books out on my e-reader.[1]

This also means that every so often, I am gripped by panic because a book I put on hold is available and I only have a few weeks to read it.

Such was the case with Sarah Rose Etter's Ripe.

I tend to shy away from any writing that relies on the term "late-stage capitalism" in its marketing. This is based the personal bias that the term is too ahistorical given what we know about the history of capitalism. Put differently, there is nothing very new about the dynamics at play in the system we've used to organize society for the last +150 years. Maybe the industries are different (e.g. software development instead of textile manufacturing), maybe the numbers are higher (e.g. billionaires instead of millionaires), but the assumption that there are stages and contemporary society is nearing the end of a predefined process feels a bit too teleological for my taste. All this is just a long-winded way to say: I was ready to put down the book and return it early if it rang a bit too hollow.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the term was mostly marketing schlock. What's more, I found this to be a pleasant counterpoint its ingenuous doppelgänger, Sourdough by Robin Sloan. In Ripe, the daily anxieties and contradictions of working for a San Francisco startup are depicted more accurately than other accounts I've read. The tension in the story builds and builds until we are left to sit with a much more ambiguous understanding of the world as it is and where it might be headed. What's more, Etter embraces surrealism in a refreshing way that you won't often find in contemporary fiction. It added rather than detracted from the weight and depth of the story.

I don't think I would give a full-throated recommendation of this book to friends and family[2]. But I do think anyone who has experienced the Bay Area tech scene in the past decade will find this novel incisive and horrifying.

  1. If you live in the U.S. and are reading this, consider this your regular reminder to make sure your library card is active and that you are using it often! Public libraries are the single best institutions created by American tax dollars.

  2. This seems to be a theme with my recent reviews. Not sure what that says about my reading habits.

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