“Right here’s the sick reality: the cash makes me really feel secure, the dangerous elements of the world stored at bay, a safety, at the very least for now,” confesses the narrator of Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe (Scribner, July 2023). The 33-year-old is a cog within the machine of a $16 billion startup that makes use of knowledge to push customers to purchase merchandise; she is essential in that she’s the pinnacle advertising author, and subsequently nominally answerable for telling the corporate’s story, but additionally in no way essential, in that she solutions to company overlords and, if she have been to stop or be fired, one has the sense she’d get replaced inside the week. She lives in San Francisco, the place she cultivates a faux self to deal with the job she doesn’t imagine in (although “it’s onerous to inform the place I finish and she or he begins”) and to cover the black gap that follows her wherever she goes—a literal small black gap, a light-sucking spacetime anomaly that solely she will be able to see.
There are violent indicators of capitalism’s failures throughout her: an unhoused man sleeps on the sidewalk exterior her $3k/month condo, an individual self-immolates on the road, fires tint the sky, acquaintances fail time and again to actually join. At one level a automobile driver tells the narrator that town was higher twelve years in the past, earlier than folks like her (tech employees) turned so ubiquitous—which is a sentiment I’ve additionally typically felt about San Francisco, the place the place I used to be born and grew up and discover difficult and luxurious; it’s additionally much like what locals say about folks like me transferring to town I reside in now. “I suppose every little thing was higher twelve years in the past,” the narrator replies.
There’s some irony in her incapacity to find magnificence anyplace round her, which appears due partly to her black gap, as a result of Etter’s sentences in regards to the phenomenon are filled with it. “The black gap looms close to the ceiling, massive and spinning slowly,” the narrator observes. “There’s a acquainted crack in my chest, close to my coronary heart, and the sharp ache of loneliness returns, the truth of being unknown, by no means really identified, by anybody on the planet. The feeling appears infinite, a darkish sky that extends right into a universe that extends into one more universe after which one other past that, a horizon with no last level.”
