Starred review from May 15, 2023
Etter follows The Book of X with an explosive narrative of a woman coming undone as the world burns. Cassie, 33, toils for a cultlike tech startup, commuting by train from her expensive San Francisco apartment to the Voyager office in Silicon Valley. She copes with long hours and impossible demands from her bullying boss, Sasha, by doing cocaine and drinking cold brew, and barely keeps her anxiety, isolation, and explosive anger at bay with meditation techniques. After a sexually satisfying but doomed affair with a polyamorous chef ends, she discovers she’s pregnant. The news headlines on her phone announce wildfires and a deadly virus, but even more menacing is the black hole that only she can see (“A dark heat emanates from its center. A metallic smell overtakes me, the scent of outer space,” she narrates while on the train). Whether the black hole is a metaphor, a science-fiction element, or a symptom of psychosis, it shrinks and expands depending on her circumstances and emotional state. Etter cranks up the tension in her portrayal of Cassie’s mind and of the workplace, as Cassie’s rage increases and she gets roped into an illegal hacking scheme to take down a competitor. A deliciously bitter irony pervades; after a man self-immolates in Cassie’s neighborhood, Sasha announces she’s off to Burning Man; and while Cassie worries about how she’ll afford an abortion, Sasha spends a fortune on freezing her eggs. A scathing look at corporate greed and its many dire consequences, this is deeply felt and cathartic. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary.
Starred review from July 1, 2023
Set in the high-pressure world of Silicon Valley, this unsettling novel by Etter (The Book of X, 2019) follows the unraveling of a millennial tech worker. Cassie left behind a dysfunctional family in a dead-end town for a job at the startup VOYAGER. There, she is overwhelmed by the relentless pace and the cult-like devotion of the Believers, identified by their company clothing and ""their faces melting into their phones." Only Cassie seems to see through the illusion, witnessing unhoused men sleeping on the streets next to the gleaming campus. "Imagine biting into a seemingly ripe fruit," she thinks, "only to have your mouth filled with rot." The unreality of her situation is enhanced as her colleagues attend lavish parties, unconcerned by encroaching disasters. Cassie, meanwhile, struggles to pay for basic necessities and alternates between all-consuming rage and despair. Her life begins to implode as she is pushed to cross ethical boundaries and ignores signs of an unplanned pregnancy. Masterfully juxtaposing "wild amounts of wealth" with "extreme poverty and displacement," Etter examines deep inequities in an image-obsessed, capitalist society. Her biting social commentary layers horror with dark comedy, using vivid imagery and striking language to great effect. Readers will savor this astonishing tour de force.
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Starred review from June 1, 2023
Cassie is just like many other women in Silicon Valley: She works hard, lives alone, and has few relationships that matter. Cassie is also, perhaps, nothing like other women, because an actual black hole hovers over her, growing and shrinking and shimmering, matching her anxieties and moods. Through these contradictions, Etter has created a surreal landscape gradually building in bleakness. The first-person narrative follows Cassie as she struggles to perform at her startup's ruthless pace; she burns out regularly and does cocaine to keep up. Her precious hours outside work are spent in the company of friends who barely care about her or in pursuit of a man who, because of his existing girlfriend, refuses to be involved with Cassie beyond their intensely erotic dates. Set just as the Covid pandemic is beginning, the book evocatively depicts Cassie's anxieties--about her precarious employment, rising rent, and a possible unplanned pregnancy. As in her Shirley Jackson Award-winning first novel, The Book of X (2019), Etter builds a lush and decaying landscape around a woman with an impossible affliction, but as the novel progresses it becomes clear that dead-end labor in a toxic workplace is even crueler to Cassie than the space-time collapse of a black hole following her around. Presenting a cross between the cruel relationships in Mona Awad's Bunny, the painful work conditions in Raven Leilani's Luster, and the unethical tech-industry practices in Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley, this novel reveals seemingly ordinary terrors. Etter's prose is spare: The story is told through short narrative sections interspersed with sections starting with a word and its definition (for instance, sex, work, and Salisbury steak) in which Cassie describes a memory through an idea or an object, as well as lists and notes. While the novel unfolds slowly, the violence and intensity of Etter's style (as well as its calculated silences and pauses) produce a horror that lingers long after the story has ended. As Cassie says, "The truth of the world bares itself when the tide goes down: devoured, used, rotting." A lurid, tense, and compelling novel.
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