Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

Published by Scribner on July 11, 2023

An insecure young woman named Cassie moves to San Francisco, gets a job in the tech world, rents an apartment she can’t afford, uses coke to keep up with work that doesn’t seem terribly demanding, is disparaged by co-workers because she doesn’t possess skills that her job doesn’t require, and spends most of her time thinking about the black hole that hovers over her existence. She stresses about wildfires and Covid-19 and a missed period. She stresses about whether to have an abortion. Maybe some readers will relate to Cassie and appreciate Ripe for that reason. I enjoyed Sarah Rose Etter’s writing style despite its forced cleverness but found little about the story to be fresh or engaging.

Cassie was essentially booted out of her house by parents who likely grew weary of her moodiness. She moved to San Francisco and took a job as the head writer for a marketing team at a “unicorn startup” that gathers data “to target users and drive them to make purchases online.” She is working in that position when the novel starts, although Etter supplies flashbacks to her backstory.

Cassie’s CEO wants to destroy their largest competitor. To that end, he gleefully accepts Cassie’s proposal to hire a hacker to cause a massive data breach that will irreparably injure the competitor’s reputation. Cassie doesn’t seem to have any ethical standard that would drive her away from such sleazy business tactics, much less prevent her from suggesting them. Nor does she have a sufficient sense of self-worth to stand up to co-workers who undermine her to promote their own advancement.

None of this makes Cassie an attractive character. Had she found motivation to change her life for the better, the novel might have had merit as a story of redemption. The bleak ending reflects the reality of a bleak life, but it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for a young woman with a six figure salary whose problems don’t compare to those of the homeless people she steps over on her way to her overpriced apartment. (She refuses to share with roommates to cut her expenses, another example of her unwillingness to implement simple solutions to problems that would be easy to address if she focused first on overcoming her depression.)

Etter begins chapters with definitions of words (black hole, family, intimacy, betrayal) and offers examples of how the words define her life. That’s modestly clever, even if Etter’s reliance on the gimmick seems a bit forced by the novel’s end. Etter’s dark humor, including her depiction of the unethical startup, is inconsistently amusing but unconvincing. Cassie’s CEO is a stereotype and therefore unworthy of mockery. Her co-workers are stereotypes of backbiters climbing the ladder of success. Cassie’s lover is a stereotype of a guy in an open relationship who just uses women for sex (although he actually seems like a nicer guy than the stereotype would suggest). None of the characters, apart from Cassie, feel authentic.

Cassie regularly reports about the status of her black hole. When she’s having a pleasant (usually sexual) experience, it shrinks. When she’s stressed, it expands. Usually it’s expanding. It would be difficult to find a more obvious metaphor for depression than a black hole. From time to time, Cassie explains superficial facts about black holes that she has discovered in her research. Maybe those facts advance the metaphor but they add little to the story. Etter’s repeated use of a pomegranate as a metaphor is at least more interesting than the black hole, although I never quite understood what a pomegranate is supposed to represent.

Images of pain and death pervade the story. Cassie sees someone set himself on fire. Homeless people are howling. Men are “split open on the train tracks.” All of this foreshadows a dark ending — literally dark, given the presence of a black hole that swallows all light and hope.

Etter makes shallow observations like “Love is just as painful as its absence” but we’ve heard that before, haven’t we? Cassie has a real self and a fake self (maybe a riff on T.S. Eliot). She has issues with her parents. She’s undermined at work by co-workers seeking to pull themselves up by pulling her down. Abortion protestors try to shame her. All of these scenes have been done to death in fiction. There is nothing new or fresh in Ripe.

It’s important to understand that depression is a serious disease that overcomes the ability to find a reason to live. I get it. At the same time, it is difficult to find value in the bleak story of a woman who is capable of functioning in the world but incapable of making even a rudimentary effort to overcome her depression. In the absence of original storytelling, I can’t recommend the novel, even for its sharp prose.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Published by Doubleday on July 18, 2023

Crook Manifesto is a sequel to Harlem Shuffle. The combined novels tell the story of Ray Carney, but in doing so they tell the story of Harlem. While Crook Manifesto takes the form of three solid crime stories — they often read like literary thrillers — the two books combine to trace changes in culture, race relations, and urban politics in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is also a story of resilience and fortitude, showcased in one character but present in an entire community, an entire race.

Carney’s father was killed by the police while committing a robbery. Carney both followed in his father’s footsteps by turning to crime when he needed cash and surpassed his father by getting a business degree and opening his own furniture store. The business allowed him to prosper, but during desperate times he paid the bills by developing a side business as a fence. That criminal career drives the plot in Harlem Shuffle.

By the end of Harlem Shuffle and at the beginning of Crook Manifesto, Carney thinks he has gone straight. He misses the excitement or glamor of fencing stolen property, but he has a family to raise and doesn’t miss the risk of imprisonment. Unfortunately, a return to crime is inevitable. “Crooked stays crooked.”

The first of three criminal episodes involves a bent cop named Munson. Like all New York cops, Munson has been shaking down criminals and legitimate businesses (including Carney’s). The police are out of sorts because the Black Liberation Army is committing crimes to raise cash and may have killed a cop. Munson tries to frame the BLA when he commits a serious theft from an underworld boss. The scheme goes sideways when Munson tries to screw his partner out of the partner’s share. He wants Carney to fence some hot jewelry because Carney’s no longer in the business and will not be an immediate suspect. Carney becomes Munson’s de facto partner in a criminal escapade that puts them both at risk. Carney doubts that Munson will allow him to live when the day comes to an end.

The second part takes its theme from the blaxploitation movies that were popular in the 1970s. A Harlem filmmaker wants to make a movie featuring a black actress who has had small roles in Hollywood movies. She’ll be a “black lady secret agent in the cracker-killing business.” The filmmaker is shooting a scene in Carney’s store and has hired Carney’s friend Pepper to provide security. When the actress disappears, Pepper goes on a Harlem adventure to find her, eventually tangling with one of the underworld bosses.

The novel’s last act takes place at the intersection of arson and political corruption. The media blame black activists for fires in Harlem that are actually caused by poor wiring or arson-for-profit schemes. A Harlem politician is behind many of the schemes. Tenements burn down, the owners cash in on insurance, the city acquires the deeds, the property gets sold for redevelopment, and various politicians and bureaucrats get a slice of the profits. When a boy is hospitalized in one of the fires, Carney decides to find out who is responsible. He hires Pepper to help him investigate. Both men pay a price for noticing entrenched corruption.

All three stories are classic crime dramas, complete with fistfights, death threats, and an occasional chase scene. Without slowing the action, Whitehead tells a bigger story about race and changing times in Harlem. It is a story of violent cops, political corruption, entrenched racism, and accepted sexism (particularly concerning black women). Yet Whitehead doesn’t beat the reader over the head with polemic. Carney is something of an everyman (or more specifically, an every black man) who faces the same family and business issues as everyone else who strives for success, but takes it as a given, hardly worth noticing, that he must overcome additional barriers because of his race.

Carney uses music (a Jackson 5 concert), movies (Superfly), black standup comedians (edgier than Bill Cosby), and headlines (Vietnam, white fear of a race war) to take the reader back in time. They also set the scene for Carney’s journey. He realizes that kids hear songs of heartbreak at a young age to prepare them for the reality of adult life. “You sing the sad songs first, then you act them out.” He understands that black entertainers are looking for a way out of lives that offer fewer opportunities than white people expect. Expressions that are popular in the 1970s add to the atmosphere. Pepper likes the phrase “getting over” as an expression of black people finding “a way to outwit white people’s rules.”

Pepper has lived a rougher life than Carney, although Carney and his wife have reserved a room for “Uncle Pepper” in their home. Pepper grew up wondering what it would be like to live in a home like Carney’s. He values the acceptance he feels in Carney’s home, but he never feels entirely comfortable. His is a life of the street, albeit a life that is governed by a moral code. Pepper is a powerful character and an interesting contrast to Carney.

The book highlights changes in society that are reflected in Harlem. The city is burning, “not because of sick men with matches and cans of gas but because the city itself was sick, waiting for fire, begging for it.” Thanks to arson, urban renewal is gentrifying the neighborhoods. Bars that cater to criminals are harder to find. “They are dying off, the old crooks and hustlers and flimflam artists, or upstate after an ill-advised scheme to cover medical bills or six months’ back rent or new teeth.” The city is breaking down. Blue collar jobs are gone and white collar jobs are reserved for white skin. “The blacks and Puerto Ricans are squeezed into smaller and smaller ghettos that were once thriving neighborhoods.”

Still, by the third story, Carney has made a comparatively good life for himself. He belongs to a Harlem social club and associates with high rollers, although he no longer remembers why he wanted to keep their company. When he faces another catastrophe, he takes it is stride because catastrophe is all he can expect from life. He might still find a way to get over.

Resilience is the book’s overriding theme. Black men came to New York from Alabama because in Harlem, they could be men. Black musicians are “beat down, their skulls full of dead-end thoughts,” but “they keep playing.” Carney won’t stop striving until he’s dead. “The city tried to break him. It didn’t work. He was genuine Manhattan schist and that don’t break easy.” The story is inspirational in its message that endurance is a way to win a battle, that progress may be incremental but it can never be stopped.

RECOMMENDED

Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on July 11, 2023

Between 1965 and 1967, Andy Warhol taped his conversations with Ondine (among others) in the Factory, his Manhattan studio. Two high school girls and two other typists transcribed the tapes in 1967. Warhol published the transcriptions, complete with typos, as a, A Novel. The lowercase “a” doubles as a reference to amphetamines and as a shoutout to e.e. cummings.

Nothing Special is a character study that imagines the lives of the two teenage typists. The story is narrated by Mae; the other typist is Shelley. Warhol, Ondine, Lou Reed, and the beautiful people who surrounded Warhol appear like out-of-focus characters in the background of movie scenes, present but usually unimportant. Nothing Special is not their story. It is the story of a young woman who compares herself to Warhol’s entourage and thinks of herself as nothing special.

After Mae’s father died, Mikey moved in with her mother. Mae had no problem with Mikey but didn’t want to give him the chance to exercise parental authority over her. Nor did she want to end up as a waitress like her mentally ill mother.

At 17, Mae is spending her afternoons riding escalators at Macy’s. She needs a place to go after school to avoid returning home, where she would only fight with her mother or resent Mikey. She feels abandoned by Maud, her only friend.

“Humming with hidden energy,” Mae soon notices that she is attracting male attention on her escalator rides. She enjoys making herself “available for public consumption.” When a man’s hand deliberately touches hers on the escalator rail, she rides the escalator every day until she sees him again. They go to a restaurant and then to bed, where he rubs her “small, pudgy stomach in circular motions as if I was a sick animal.”

The man’s mother feeds her breakfast in the morning and recommends a doctor who can help with her problems. The doctor has a cure for loneliness. Presumably the doctor is popular with certain patients because of the pills he prescribes. Instead of prescribing pills, he gives Mae the address of Warhol’s Factory and tells her that he always needs girls to run errands for him.

Mae becomes a secretary at the Factory. Mae and Shelley answer the phone before being assigned to transcribe recordings. Mae sees Warhol painting or talking at the other end of the studio, but rarely interacts with him. “Even when he was in a room full of people, he was apart from them. Totally separate, though he was connected to everything.”

The recordings are of conversations. Ondine (a/k/a The Pope) “was the main talker, words tumbling from him in a ceaseless monologue. . . . He existed only to be recorded.” Warhol and Ondine share “the excitement of people who thought they were separate from everything else, who had somehow, despite everything, managed to make their own private world.” Yet they also seem to be putting on a show for the rest of the world. There are moments when Ondine sounds “tired of playing himself, moments of paralyzing doubt about the point of any of it.”

Mae feels like God eavesdropping on the conversations of people who are above the law. At the same time, she resents the “obscene entitlement” of beautiful women who “lounge around the studio, unbothered by the idea of work, uninterested in any pursuits,” sometimes appearing in Warhol’s movies. Mae practices being “blank, impervious and assured” like the women in his films. The recordings teach her how to appear seductive and disinterested at the same time. They plant “ideas of humiliation and cruelty” in her mind and give her a “sudden lust for degrading experiences.”

The recordings seem important to Mae in a way that nothing ever has; they become her life. Still, she knows she is just a typist. She has sexual encounters with random men at Warhol’s parties but will never “be in demand” like the women who stand in line to be in his films. She is an audience, not a performer.

Mae’s job allows her to learn about life. In that sense, Nothing Special is a coming-of-age novel. Meeting Warhol’s mother, Mae wants to be “dignified and distant.” Watching her co-workers, Mae realizes it is “fun to watch things fall apart.” Watching the beautiful people who surround Warhol, Mae comes to understand pretense: “You don’t have to actually be a maniac, you could just wear the clothes.” She creates her own pretense, casting herself as a writer rather than a typist.

Mae's most profound revelation comes from watching Shelley and understanding that her true life is “waiting to be found and lived.” When Mae tells Shelley she should try to live her own life, Mae could be talking to herself. And she could be listening to herself when Shelley responds, “I did try.”

Mae also learns about relationships. She does not know how to handle her estrangement from her friend Maud. She stays away from her mother and argues with Mikey. She loves and hates Shelley for the same reason — she sees herself in Shelley’s ordinariness. One of the voices on a tape describes Warhol as leaving people behind, disposing of them — the very thing Mae is starting to do.

Shelley fares less well than Mae. She “had something, even if what she had was strange.” Shelley is mocked for not being among the Warhol elite when she auditions for a part in one of his movies. For reasons she won’t explain, Shelley tears apart one of the Warhol tapes. Mae claims her mother destroyed it, giving rise to the accepted explanation for the missing tape.

Nothing Special tells a clever story, using the Warhol Factory as a backdrop to illustrate important themes that generally have little to do with the iconic artist’s life. The story begins in 2010, when a game show host triggers Mae’s memory by asking “Who shot Andy Warhol?” It ends in 1985, a time when Mae has become a better version of herself. She offers brief descriptions of the phases of her life — the drinking phase, the Bible study phase, the self-help reading phase, the family reconciliation phase.

Mae has rejected society’s demands for righteous indignation. She does not want to denounce Mikey or her mother. Perhaps the greatest lesson she has learned — perhaps the best lesson to draw from the story — is the importance of avoiding judgment, including self-judgment. Mae has learned not to judge herself for living her own life, for not living up to the standards of people like those who surrounded Warhol, people who didn’t know how to be themselves. Maybe she is nothing special, but opinions about who is or isn’t “special” don’t matter. Learning to live your best life, even if that life goes largely unnoticed, is what matters. I recommend Nothing Special because Mae's contrast of an unusual time in her life to the life she would eventually settle into brings clarity to those lessons.

RECOMMENDED

Sucker by Daniel Hornsby

Published by Anchor on July 11, 2023

Sucker is marketed as a satire, but it takes the form of a thriller that morphs into a horror novel. I suspect the horror is meant to be satirical, because vampires are only taken seriously by Bram Stoker fans and romance novelists. Unfortunately, the horror comes too late to distinguish Sucker from non-satirical thrillers that follow the same formula.

Sucker tells a story of corporate greed driven by a “secret society” that is controlling the world (or, at least, pulling the strings that matter to its members). Its members have an ability they describe as “the Gift.” Perhaps it is the concept of a secret cabal (common in thriller literature and far-right blogs) that Daniel Hornsby meant to satirize. Or perhaps he meant to mock Elizabeth Holmes, who famously bilked investors with promises of technical advances in medicine that they probably should have recognized as unachievable. Regardless of Hornsby’s intent, Sucker hews too tightly to the conventions and content of a traditional thriller to satirize effectively.

The story is apparently set in an alternate universe where the tech industry is centered in San Narcisco and Facebook is called GetTogether. Perhaps the changes were intended to assure that Holmes wouldn’t sue Hornsby. At the heart of the story is a young man named Charlie. Charlie is not a virtuous thriller hero. He’s a bit of a slacker. He’s self-centered and often self-pitying. He’s nevertheless interesting because his faults give him enormous room for growth. The plot of Sucker creates an incentive for Charlie to become a better person. Circumstances also give him the opportunity to remain self-centered. What choice Charlie will make fuels the story’s minimal dramatic tension. Given the artificial nature of the choice, I’m not sure many readers will care what Charlie does.

Charlie calls himself Chuck Gross but he was born Charles Grossheart, the son of a wealthy businessman. His father made a fortune in the oil industry by being evil. He pays lobbyists to disparage global warming so that his fossil fuel investments are not threatened by trivial concerns like destroying the planet.

Charlie uses a different working name so that he will not be disparaged as a music producer. He started his own label devoted to the rebirth of punk rock, appropriately named Obnoxious. His “noisy vanity project” is bleeding money, but he hopes a newly released album called Sucker by Pro Laps will improve its revenues. It helps that Thane, the band’s lead male vocalist, made the news by dying under mysterious circumstances. His girlfriend, the band’s drummer, now sings Pro Laps songs with the kind of grief that punk fans regard as authentic. Thanks to Thane’s suspicious death, Obnoxious might make money after all.

Before Thane dies, Charlie worries about paying his artists without going to his family for help. He accepts an invitation from his college friend, Olivia Watts, to join her business as a creative consultant. Mostly Olivia wants to exploit Charlie’s family name to attract investors to her business. The company claims it is engineering biological nanobots that will monitor and eventually cure medical problems as they arise, dramatically extending lifespans. Olivia’s true goal is less humanitarian. Olivia is the Elizabeth Holmes character in that her promised technological advances are untethered to reality. Perhaps Holmes, like Olivia, had “the Gift” in the sense that she had an unusual talent for persuading investors to follow her. I’m not sure that appealing to greed actually requires any persuasive talent, but the Gift is a key element of Olivia’s success.

Charlie is eventually approached by a whistleblower who has evidence that Olivia’s company is scamming investors by making overblown claims of success in its research. Charlie doesn’t know whether to believe the whistleblower or his old friend Olivia, although he eventually recognizes obvious signs that Olivia is manipulating him. The novel finally shifts into second gear when the whistleblower arrives, but it travels a long road in first before it reaches that point.

To foreshadow the conspiracy plot, Charlie encounters a symbol — an infinity sign with teeth — at odd locations on Olivia’s company property. Why is the symbol carved into a table leg? Who knows. Eventually we learn about “an ancient society of the world’s most intelligent and talented individuals, all working to bring about the evolution of humanity to something better, stronger.” Secret societies are ubiquitous in thrillers. I wish they existed so they could do something useful, although in most thrillers they are only interested in advancing the interests of their members. A society doesn’t need to be secret to advance that goal. The Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, among many others, operate in the open to achieve their nefarious ends.

About two-thirds of the novel has passed before we learn the truth about Olivia. That truth made me wonder why I’d been reading about Charles’ obsession with his family and his little music company, none of which has much to do with the story’s eventual focus. I suppose the revelation is where the satire begins, the point at which a mundane story about a rebellious rich kid begins to emulate a thriller, complete with murders and chase scenes. Olivia acknowledges that her scheme will do something awful to test subjects, something that might appear “unsavory” to the uninitiated. I suppose that’s satire, as is Olivia’s notion of wealthy people who have “the Gift” leading a cultural and biological evolution. Perhaps the intent is to blend white supremacy with wealthy entitlement while poking fun at both of them, but the satire never grabbed me, never exposed anything that hasn’t always been obvious. Swindlers are bad? Global warming deniers are evil? Greed isn’t good? Oh really? A better title for a novel making those points without developing them into an exciting story would be Obvious Observations.

Some paragraphs of Sucker feel like padding. A diatribe about zebras and a description/discussion of various family portraits in the Grossheart mansion add little beyond word count to the story. Yes, the zebra eventually becomes a symbol of Charlie’s true essence, but only in Charlie’s deluded mind. Hornsby’s smooth prose kept me reading even as I continued to wonder how he planned to make an interesting story out of a secret society and punk rock and vampires. As satire, a vampire story doesn’t have the bite (no pun intended) of a proposal to eat children. Even with the addition of mysterious deaths and an Elizabeth Holmes clone, Hornsby never developed an engrossing story, whether it is classified as a thriller or a horror novel or a satire. I was ultimately disappointed that some decent writing and characterization failed to serve a stronger story.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on July 11, 2023

Set in Louisiana during the Civil War, Flags on the Bayou is a departure from the crime novels that James Lee Burke usually writes. While the novel reads like a thriller, many of the crimes that inform the novel are crimes against humanity — slavery, the wholesale slaughter of war, enforced poverty, sexual abuse of women. Yet circumstances make key characters into killers, setting up a crime story about two women who must run from the law, women who (in a nineteenth century version of Thelma and Louise) would rather die than tolerate more abuse.

Near the end of 1863, Confederate soldiers are in retreat. By virtue of the Emancipation Proclamation, there are no more slaves, but not all plantation owners agree. Slaves continue to work in the fields while slave catchers continue to round them up, whether or not they have been emancipated, to sell them at slave auctions.  

Hannah Laveau is a (former) slave who lost track of her son at Shiloh. Hannah might be a witch. God might be talking to her. She might have mutilated and killed plantation owner Minos Suarez after he raped her. She wanted to kill him but isn’t sure whether she did. She might have done the same to her jailer.

Pierre Cauchon, a constable in charge of Negro affairs who is widely regarded as white trash, considers it his duty to bring Hannah to justice, but he must deal with the humiliations he has endured from Wade Lufkin, Hannah’s (former) owner. A duel with Lufkin scars Cauchon’s face but does not solve his problem. Nor does it resolve Lufkin’s tender feelings about Hannah or Cauchon’s about Darla Babineaux, a (former) slave owned by Suarez who refuses to work in the fields again. Wade and Cauchon are both tormented by guilt about the harm they have caused to others, just as they are tormented by love.

Florence Milton is a teacher and an abolitionist. Her skin is the right color to earn respect in the South, but she is regarded as a criminal because she works to help escaped slaves find their freedom. Her gender makes her a target regardless of her political beliefs.

Two characters, both brutal and crazed, represent the worst of the Union and Confederate officers. Colonel Carleton Hayes is a character who, more than any other, embodies evil. He commands hundreds of irregulars, fighting his own battles by unconventional means. He has slashed and burned his way through the war, destroying a Texas village because a woman spat on one of his men. Yet he considers himself an exemplar of southern manners and decorum. Captain John Endicott kills and rapes indiscriminately. Other soldiers say that Endicott does not represent the Union but they do nothing to stop him.

Burke is one of my favorite writers. His characters are complex, his stories move at a steady pace, and his prose is astonishing. His narration and dialog are always quotable:

Colonel Hayes: “There is no equal to poor white trash when they get their hands on a Bible.”

Hayes: “War is a confession of failure, and its perpetrators are the merchants of death, not because they are killers but because they never had the courage to live a decent life.”

Cauchon: “With regularity, North and South, we give power to people who have no interest in us.”

Cauchon: “You don’t need to seek revenge against your enemies. The bastards eventually fall in their own shite.”

Cauchon: “Never let them tell you that there is rhyme or reason to war, lest you join the lunatics who have perpetuated its suffering from the cave to the present.”

Burke never writes a novel based on a simplistic view of the world. He recognizes good and evil and understands the vast area of gray that separates them. Soldiers and officers from both the North and the South committed atrocities during the Civil War. Soldiers fought for pride more often than they fought for ideology. Soldiers from the North looted plantations and confiscated livestock that owners needed to feed their children. Soldiers from both sides raped women. There was no glory in the Civil War, no matter how often its battles are reenacted or its officers are commemorated.

Burke considers Flags on the Bayou to be his best novel. I think he said the same thing about The Jealous Kind (2016), a novel that I would probably put at the top of the list, but Flags on the Bayou belongs in his top five. It brings the tension and pace of a thriller as it encourages the reader to contemplate the moral issues that surround war in general, and the Civil War in particular.

RECOMMENDED