Ripeness (2025)
Why this one?
A book that sounded intriguing, by a highly acclaimed author who I’ve not yet managed to read.
Sarah Moss (1975- ; active 2006- ) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, before moving to Manchester, England at a young age. She studied multiple degrees at the University of Oxford, including a doctorate in Romantic poetry, and has since held various fellowships in Literature and Creative Writing. In 2009, she spent a year teaching at the University of Iceland. More recently, she has been living and working in Ireland at University College Dublin.
Her first novel, Cold Earth, was published by Granta in 2009. Her second, Night Waking (2011) won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Three of her books in a row were shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize (which was awarded for literature dealing with subjects relating to health and medicine), with Bodies of Light (2014) taking home the 2015 Prize. Ghost Wall (2018) was longlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. She has published eight novels to date, as well as numerous works of non-fiction, includin a memoir of her year in Iceland. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019.
Ripeness will be published by Pan Macmillan in May 2025. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
Ripeness is told from the perspective of the 70-year-old Edith, brought up in England’s Midlands but here living a comfortable life in rural Ireland, somewhere around the present day. It consists of two strands: one focuses on her pleasant but mundane life in the here and now, her casual relationship (post-divorce) with Gunter, and her friendship with Maebh, who receives a message from a man in America claiming to be her half-brother. The second intertwining strand takes the form of a missive from Edith to her nephew, to be open upon her death, which describes the circumstances leading up to his birth in 1960s Italy to her young ballet-dancer sister Lydia. There are subtle plot details which slowly reveal themselves over the course of both parts of the narrative, which while not earth-shatteringly shocking are still integral to the reading experience, so I’ll keep my summary brief here.
The first thing to note here is the quality of the writing. It’s beautifully economical, making for a really pleasurable reading experience. The 1960s section, set in an artist’s residence on the shores of Lake Como, is particularly evocative, in spite of the at times troubling subject matter it’s never a chore to read, with rich but never overwrought descriptions of overripe fruit, chilly dips in the pool and marble bathrooms. The present day section is (perhaps purposefully) a little more flat and grey by comparison, with the action switching a little more to Edith’s inner world rather than dwelling on her surroundings.
It’s a book of intertwining themes, parallels and contrasts. Throughout, themes of (im)migration and the general movement of people (for good or ill) loom large. In the postwar Italian section, its young characters (the sisters and Lydia’s ballet friends) travel freely around Europe, without consequence and largely without much engagement with the local population, who appear largely as household servants, with the English characters (save Edith) engaging with them only as domestic servants and shopkeepers, and barely considering trying to speak the language. Through Edith’s narrative, though, we learn of her Jewish family heritage and explore the contrasts of this carefree/careless movement with the ‘suitcases always packed, ready for escape’ mentality of her mother and other ancestors.
In the present day, Edith has settled in Ireland, and despite occasional moments of awkwardness and moderate cultural difference, she is largely accepted as a ‘good immigrant’ and forms part of the local community. The same applies to the Ukrainian immigrants arriving in the wake of the Russian invasion, but strangely not to ‘other’ immigrants, who we encounter being bussed down from Dublin to take refuge in a local hotel. Edith’s reaction to her friend Maebh’s involvement in a protest against these other immigrants (presumably from non-European countries and of non-white extraction) is one of the more interesting pivot points of the book, with perhaps not quite the expected result.
Elsewhere, there are nods to other big contemporary themes. Modern day Edith is attempting to do her best in the face of the climate catastrophe, but fretting over whether she should take flights to join her friends on a holiday. We’re also not long after the Covid lockdowns, and Edith reflects on (elderly, vulnerable) friends of hers who appear to have withdrawn from the world during that period and never returned. The background to Lydia’s pregnancy is one which will continue to (sadly) resonate for many, even if her reaction to it may be shocking to some who have never found themselves in a similar situation.
Most interesting, I think, though, are the subtleties of the narrative around immigration / racism that runs through the whole thing. Edith seems to have found, through her travels, engagement with history, and life experience, a likeable kind of tolerance but she also demonstrates a kind of resignation to the forces of history, which at present seem to be swinging in the direction of intolerance. At her lifestage, Edith clearly lacks the energy to fight her friends over their racist views, even as they clearly wound her on a personal level. (While she was no more feisty as a 17-year-old in Italy, she displayed tendencies that suggested she might have grown more of a backbone in later life).
She’s perhaps representative of a kind of tragically fading idealism, a sort of European / liberal postwar consensus around freedom of movement and not slipping back into the seemingly obvious use of genetics to determine identity. The arrival of Maebh’s ‘brother’, who found her on some kind of 23&Me DNA test site, is to Edith both something she can facilitate and celebrate as a friend, but also something in a sense deeply concerning for her as someone of Jewish heritage. Her missive to her absent nephew, purposefully hidden away until after her death, is a semi-cloaked warning of the dangers of delving too deeply into ones ‘identity’, even as it tentatively pushes him towards doing so.
In some senses, it’s a slightly unsatisfying conclusion to what is a richly engaging and thought-provoking book. I think through reading, you come to expect a bit more of Edith in terms of kicking back against some of the bad stuff she encounters around her in the world, but then perhaps she’s there as a bit of a mirror to the likely liberal-consensus readership of this book. Her heart is in the right place, but ultimately where she is now - with Gunter, with her friendship and comfortable life - is worth more to her than the battles she could be fighting. Do we think less of her, or ourselves, as a result? That’s the interesting and very much open question that I found particularly resonant here.
Score
9
A lush and immersive read, which hides deep and disturbing questions behind an easy-going façade.
Next up
Checking out Ali Smith’s latest, Gliff.
