Review of Fallow by Sarah Anderson

The Bossy Bookworm

11 minutes ago

3 min read

Anderson's debut novel offers satire and dark humor in a future where a corporate surrogate eliminates its workers' inefficiency due to childbearing. Our main protagonist is greedy, lazy, and far from introspective, yet I couldn't stop reading about her often petty, short-sighted, shallow motivations.

Natalie is a young adult working at a soul-crushing job at a call center when she is offered what feels like the perfect opportunity for short-term sacrifice and long-term financial gain: she becomes the first corporate-sponsored surrogate mother. She's soon enlisted for a well-compensated ten-year period of heavily regulated pregnancy conditions and tasked with a goal of seven births, all so that the company's executives can build families without losing productivity due to physical challenges around conceiving and carrying babies.

In between pregnancies Natalie is allowed fallow periods when she is wild, carefree, hedonistic, and able to pay for any distraction she chooses. She seesaws from periods of prescribed meal, exercise, meditation, propaganda-building, and sleep regimens when her every need is healthfully provided to weeks- and months-long free-for-alls in which she behaves as an unregulated young adult.

Throughout her years of surrogate work for the corporation, Natalie has plenty of time to reflect upon the person she wants to be and the future she wants to live out, but does little of either. She is prickly and greedy, not particularly introspective, and not inclined to consider complex issues around responsibility, identity, motherhood, or her future.

The story then involves a shocking shift in Natalie's circumstances--which initially felt jarring to me as a reader and makes the book feel almost like two disparate stories in one. After the shift, significant page time is spent within a commune--the farthest thing from Natalie's interest set, as has been clearly established for much of the book.

The commune is strange and irresistible; what feel like naive approaches to community existence begin to feel less creepy and more peaceful to Natalie; the dirt, hard work, and constant togetherness break her down and the messy, communicative, often annoying structure make her accountable to others in a way that somehow her constantly monitored baby-carrying did not. There is nowhere to hide in any sense, and after trying to avoid productivity despite the commune's rules, Natalie ultimately develops some tendency toward reflection, begins to understand that she is answerable to others, and starts to determine her future's next steps for the first time.

Natalie is keeping an enormous secret that seemed as though it was going to be the issue on which the story would ultimately turn, but that wasn't what occurred.

Fallow drifts somewhat from the greedy corporate world stringently controlling women's childbearing to a female-driven community (which, by the way, also regulates childbearing), but I was intrigued by both sections of the story. The book is a darkly funny satire of capitalism within a plausible reality of hyperregulated systems around body autonomy, fertility, productivity, corporate party lines, and what happens if literally everything is for sale.

Natalie is an unsympathetic character, yet she nevertheless kept me hooked, wondering what would happen. The tone of the book is playful yet dystopian, and while the story poses weighty issues, Anderson's treatment of them is far from earnest or solemn and feels satirical.

This would make for an interesting book club discussion; the novel offers a lot to unpack.

I received a prepublication version of this title courtesy of NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.