Sarah Moss, Ripeness. Picador hb 2025. 296pp. Library copy

 There’s something not right about some aspects of this otherwise well-made novel – as in the two works of her earlier fiction that I’ve read (links at the end).

It opens with a woman called Edith, 73, having sex with her German lover, a ceramicist/potter called Gunter. The opening words represent the first of many literary references or allusions – a feature that becomes maybe a bit grating and show-offy:

Yes, Edith says.

Yes, yes. As if he might stop if she stops saying it, as if they were of the generation for whom consent is necessarily verbal and valid only in the moment of utterance…

This echoes, of course, Molly Bloom’s sexually ecstatic monologue at the end of Ulysses – but given an awkward, unsettling twist here (consent isn’t necessarily valid?)

This is a novel, we find as it goes on, that is about pregnancies that are either the result of rape, or else occurred when the mother is so young she may not have known how to say no, or been heard if she had. As this opening scene is set in Ireland, it brings into play the sad fact that young women in such situations were expected to give up their babies to the nuns for adoption (a lucrative sideline for the sisters, who covered up the transactions with hypocritical condemnation of what they insisted was the wickedness of these ‘fallen women’).

Two paragraphs later there’s this:

His hands, clay-hardened, steel-sinewed, crush the bird bones of her wrists. Break them, she thinks, break me, yes, no, and then thinking in soft explosion, no, no, yes…

…and she goes on to think of the lines in Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’, ‘Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you’.

Yes, this is all powerful, even shocking way of introducing the theme of sex, consent, pregnancy and sexual relations and dynamics – but as the novel develops, and we hear about several such untoward or unwanted pregnancies in the lives of people in Edith’s circle (family and social), it seems to me rather heavy-handed.

The thoughts of Edith that follow introduce the other key themes in the novel: identity, ethnicity, nationality, and exile: the difficulty of integrating and being accepted into a new country after migration. Gunter has been in Ireland for 50 years, Edith for a shorter time, but some years, it seems. She still feels that they’re outsiders. She contemplates the words ‘naturalised’, ‘assimilation’. She has four passports, because she’s a child born in England to a French (Jewish) mother, originally from Ukraine (her family fled pogroms there and settled as refugees in France), and is now officially Irish – but it’s not a ‘natural’ process, a migrant is never more than ‘unheimlich, uncanny’.

Ok, that’s all interesting enough. From here though the handling of these themes fails entirely to work. In alternating chapters we follow the 17-year-old Edith to Italy; she stays in a villa where her older sister is about to give birth. Lydia discloses that the pregnancy was not the result of consensual sex. Their ‘maman’, a largely absentee mother, has arranged for the nuns to come and take the baby away for adoption. Another displaced person is produced and removed – exiled.

The other, less compelling narrative strand tells of Edith’s mature life in Ireland. She likes solitude. The no-strings sex with Gunter, she tells herself, suits her reluctance to commit to a man again. She’d divorced an unloved husband after 40 years of marriage. Her son is more or less estranged from her.

That’s where I think I can’t engage fully with the workings of this novel. The section dealing with teenage Edith, a bookish, naïve young woman about to go up to Oxford (to study Eng Lit, of course – hence some of the frequent literary allusions), are told in the first person, and are more authentic, and it’s easier to sympathise with her gauche, sometimes painful efforts to grow up fast in this morally tangled, unconventional and messy adult situation.

 The strand involving septuagenarian Edith is told in the third person, which distances her from us. She disapproves of her Irish friend’s intolerance of African refugees who had been put up in a local hotel (a sore point still in the UK and Ireland with many people who protest against immigrants). As a daughter of a Jewish mother whose own family were murdered in the Nazi death camps, she could be expected to be particularly sensitive to such intolerance and racial prejudice. Yet she later suppresses this response in order to help her friend in her own story involving an illegitimate baby taken away from its teenage mother and now, as an adult, wanting to meet its long-lost half-sister.

Yes, it’s all quite complicated and put together with technical adroitness. It’s just that all these disparate parts don’t come together satisfactorily. It seems too contrived. All those literary references don’t help – they’re intrusive. There’s an academic reflection, for example, at one point, on the significance of the words of Edgar in King Lear to his father: ‘ripeness is all’, compared with those of Hamlet: ‘readiness is all’. An interesting point, and arguably it adds nuance to the novel’s themes and the dilemmas and decisions facing the main characters, but it’s also distracting.

There are many more such allusions, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch often cited (the squirrel’s heartbeat, etc.) Instead of enriching or illuminating the themes of or characters in the novel, they highlight the author’s artifice, point to their knowing artistry. The artist, as we know, should remain out of sight, paring their nails. (Yes, I’m doing it myself now. Annoying, isn’t it.)

Here are the links to my previous posts on Sarah Moss novels:

 The Fell (published 2021) brief note HERE

Bodies of Light (2014) HERE