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Sarah Moss
Ripeness
Ripeness
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Ripeness is an extraordinary novel about familial love and the communities we create, about migration and new beginnings, and about what it is to have somewhere to belong.
Susan's review
Some of my favourite fiction writers have also been, or are, academics, including Tessa Hadley, Zadie Smith, Isaac Asimov and C.S. Lewis. While these two modes of thinking and writing are sometimes regarded as mutually exclusive, an academic understanding of sophisticated concepts combined with a fiction writer’s imaginative flair can make for a wonderfully engaging novel. Such is the case with Sarah Moss’s new novel Ripeness. Moss currently teaches at University College Dublin, and Ripeness is self-consciously literary, as well as deeply absorbing and profoundly moving.
Ripeness is the story of Edith, as both a divorced woman in her seventies, living in contemporary rural Ireland, and a seventeen-year-old girl sent by her mother to help care for Edith’s pregnant, unmarried sister in 1960s Italy. English-born Edith’s life in an Irish village seems to offer the contentment of ageing: a sexually satisfying relationship with a local potter, a long-standing friendship with Irish-born Méabh, and an enduring connection with the natural world. The narrative of her youth, however, is complicated by her sister Lydia’s relentless refusal to even look at, let alone feed, her newborn baby. The contrast between Edith’s two lives and selves is reinforced by the novel’s point of view. The use of third person narration for a much older Edith expresses a more detached and reflective view of the world, while the sections dealing with her naïve youth, written in the first person, feel emotionally immediate, even raw: some of the novel’s most heartbreaking moments deal with young Edith’s desperate pleas to her sister to acknowledge the baby.
In charting Edith’s life, Ripeness is a richly layered exploration of the crucial existential issue of individual and collective identity. The novel essentially asks: who are we, and where, if at all, might we belong? For one thing, Edith has no fully formulated sense of a national identity: she feels no desire to return to the country where she was born and raised on a rural farm, but nor does she feel fully at home in the Ireland where she’s lived for more than three decades. The arbitrariness of national identity is reinforced by the fact that she holds passports from England, Ireland, France and Israel: legal definitions clearly have no determinative status. Moreover, and critically, Edith sees a belief in national identity as dangerous as well as arbitrary, as evidenced by the hostility of some Irish villagers towards the presence of African refugees.
The novel also reflects on the concept of religious identity. Although Edith is Jewish by birthright, she doesn’t share her mother’s strong sense of self as a Jew, an identity born from the deaths of her parents and sister in a Nazi concentration camp. Nor does biology necessarily determine or even influence who people become. When Edith’s friend Méabh is contacted late in life by a half-brother she didn’t know existed, the possibility of affinity is made available by his use of DNA testing. But the eventual meeting between the siblings is anti-climactic; it seems that science doesn’t necessarily hold the key to the puzzle of who we are. In this way, the nature versus nurture debate continues to be unresolved. A self-identity based on bodily experience is also seen as problematic. While the novel beautifully evokes the artistry, athleticism and grace of Lydia’s life as a ballet dancer, it also suggests that a sense of self, and self-worth, based on the life of the body is by its very nature impermanent.
Such conceptual complexity is signalled by the several meanings of the novel’s title. ‘Ripeness’ literally describes the state of the luscious fruit growing in Edith’s Italian garden, as a symbol for her youthful hunger for new experience. Unlike her sister’s ballet friends who visit Lydia’s borrowed mansion, Edith is curious about Italian people and rituals, but like those friends, she remains an outsider in a foreign land. As such, and to continue the metaphor, her desire for connection never comes to fruition. The novel’s title also refers to her sexual awakening in her seventies after years of a sexless, emotionally arid marriage. And in a deliberate gesture to the novel’s literariness, ‘ripeness’ is an allusion to Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear: “Men [sic] must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.” Like Edgar in the play, Edith becomes increasingly aware of the inevitability of death; an awareness which in her contemporary case is heightened by her sensitivity to the reality of climate change and the continuing suffering of millions of refugees. Rather than hammering the point, Moss presents this explicitly political dimension of the novel subtly and obliquely: like a barely visible dark cloud hovering over Edith’s loving attentiveness to the natural beauty of Ireland.
I’ve come late to Sarah Moss’s fiction, but having read Ripeness, I will be eagerly looking out for her earlier novels. Her latest book is an exquisitely written, skilfully crafted and engrossing questioning of how inhabiting a body, a family, a history and a physical region shapes our sense of being in the world. And while the Irish anti-immigrants have no doubt about who belongs to ‘their’ country, Edith chooses to live with what the novel presents as a necessary, and liberating, rejection of fixed concepts of identity.
Ripeness is now available in the Lane Bookshop.
Publisher Review
It is the 60s and, just out of school, Edith finds herself travelling to rural Italy. She has been sent by her mother with strict instructions: to see her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, through the final weeks of her pregnancy, help at the birth and then make a phone call which will seal this baby’s fate, and his mother’s. Decades later, happily divorced and newly energized, Edith is living a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. When her best friend Maebh receives a call from an American man claiming to be her brother, Maebh must decide if she will meet him, and she asks Edith for help. Ripeness is an extraordinary novel about familial love and the communities we create, about migration and new beginnings, and about what it is to have somewhere to belong.
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