GAIL PARENT Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York; SARAH ROSE ETTER Ripe. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
When Gail Parent published Sheila Levine in 1972 it wasn’t called a ‘sad girl novel’; in 2024 Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe shows the trope’s enduring popularity.
Content warning: suicidal ideation
Over 50 years ago, Gail Parent wrote a dark satire about a young woman living in New York and employed in a dead-end job, beholden to exploitative bosses, barely making rent, and dating mediocre men. An edition of Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York was republished in 2004 by The Overlook Press. It is laugh-out-loud funny with still-crisp observations.
Sheila is short, overweight and competing against ‘hundreds of Jewish lovelies, with their charm bracelets, their teased hair and their shares of AT&T, all looking for Mr Right’. Her mother advises (in all caps): ‘SHEILA, DARLING, FIND SOMEONE WHILE YOU’RE IN SCHOOL. ONCE YOU’RE OUT, IT’S HARDER.’ In 1971, if you weren’t married by graduation, or your first year out, or maybe your second at worst, you started to get desperate. Sheila Levine is one such woman and she’s planning to kill herself if things don’t change.
She has graduated in liberal arts and work options are few but she is not discouraged. She tells Miss Burke from the agency, ‘Actually, I don’t really want a job where I have to type. I want to do something creative.’
I wanted the type of job that Glamour magazine writes about … ‘Sally Harding spends most of her days in a helicopter with her handsome boss who she married just six days after becoming his creative assistant.’
Her mother urges her to become a teacher: ‘SHEILA, DARLING, LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER. TEACHING IS ALWAYS SOMETHING YOU CAN FALL BACK ON.’ Sheila eschews that but discovers the first big con about being a grown-up: that a future where she goes to buy paintings in helicopters is not waiting for her. The parallels with today’s ’sad girl’ literature are all there. Employment disappointment: tick.
With her friend Linda she scours New York for an apartment, but Doris Day has deceived them. There is no brownstone waiting for them, no ‘precious little two-bedroom … all yellow and light blue and cuddly’. Instead, they squeeze into a single bedroom with a third from college, someone they don’t even like. ‘Apartment ads are all lies. Every single one of them.’ Overpriced slum: tick.
The path out is marriage. It is only a matter of time and Sheila Levine is determined. The nice Jewish boy, Norman (who is in a reciprocated love-in with her mother), isn’t an option, so she plans activities around meeting suitable candidates. Sheila parties (or cleans up other people’s parties), travels (or loses her friends and spends time in a Parisian police station), and attends arthouse plays with unpaid actors (the only yield being a lot of ticket stubs). Changing her name was another idea, but ’[i]t was Le Vine for a full thirty days, and nothing happened.’ Unlucky in love: tick.
Now she’s 30 and has had enough. A woman who can’t get married will have no alternative but to die and she plans it out meticulously with a plot, tombstone, casket, rabbi. Nobody would say she’s ever caused anyone inconvenience. Even her burial clothes, complete with fancy new underwear, are sorted. While pricey, she reasons that the dress is going to get a lot of wear.
Unlike today’s sad girls who are searching for meaning amidst the dross of life, its waste and emptiness, sad girls in the 1970s were looking for income security, a decent rental, and to be married ahead of their younger sister. If Sheila Levine could only hold on, she might have daughters who would face more existential crises. Now that’s progress.
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter brings us to the epicentre of the current malaise crushing young women. The narrator is a 33-year-old woman, Cassie, a year into her job as head marketing writer for a billion-dollar startup in product placement. She has gone West, to California. Before she leaves, afraid, her father tells her, ‘You have to change some day, honey bun. We all do …’ Ripe’s depiction of Silicon Valley and San Francisco is dystopian. Tech is the new god that holds all life in its cabled web, keeping us either trussed and ready for later or chewed up and spat out now. There is no mercy.
Cassie snorts a line every morning with her coffee just to keep up, and says yes, yes, yes in never-ending abasement. To survive among the Believers, Cassie develops a fake self, becoming conversant in the only language understood in this world as she writes marketing plans on consumer gratification and how to milk its addicts further, all the time engaged in a performance of fake flattery and ‘you go girl’ energy.
The Believers want to be here, were born to be here. They come from the Ivy League and throw their entire beings into technology. Their eyes glow as if pixelated. Their pulses thrum from stocks, driverless cars, phones that collect the data of their lives in digital dashboards reporting: songs listened to, steps taken, places visited, workouts completed, hours slept.
If it cannot be broken down into parts, counted and recorded, it is not real.
Etter’s observations are masterful; they fester and worm under the skin. Cruelty is casual and common, dispensed by the more powerful – and more hollowed-out – like Cassie’s boss, Sasha, who hands out trinkets to her staff then lambasts them with her next breath. The company’s unethical practices, from taking down the competition to asking staff to give up their lives for the corporate good, are not questioned. Some of the startup’s workers choose to live in RVs parked on the campus:
Everyone talks about Jeremy in hushed voices, a tone of reverence for this pale blond man with dark eyes, his body toned from drinking unfamiliar supplements … How does a person live when their life has been shrunken down to almost nothing?
Cassie evinces her contempt in minor acts of rebellion: unshaven legs, cheap black dresses and clogs instead of wind jackets with tech logos, or sustainable ballet flats, or puffy vests. She has friends, other non-Believers bonded by a shared hatred of San Francisco, where her six-figure salary is eaten up by the cost of living and the very rich, in their electric vehicles, speed by the homeless encamped on the sidewalks. She obsesses about black holes and especially the one she carries within her – a melancholy that, in its dread, its suffocation, could be undiagnosed and unmedicated depression. Sometimes it looms large, eclipsing her completely. Sometimes it recedes to pinpricks in her neighbour’s eyes. But it is ever-present, singing and pulsing in her background.
Etter has written a dark novel about the shallow grasping of the information era and the lure of the tech bros whose promised land fell so short. Cassie thinks, ‘How many more hours of my life will I spend listening to men talk about themselves?’ With her non-Believer friends, her loving father and her part-time lover, she has some ballast but, increasingly, she has less and less to hold onto and few defences against the pull of the void. Etter’s prose is rapid and urgent, her staccato beats like the singing of black hole:
‘Don’t stop. Never stop. Keep working. You are better than everyone else. You don’t need food. You don’t need sugar. Work harder …’
I almost lose myself in the thrum of productivity, but beneath checking items off of my to-do list, beneath the mask of my fake self, a sound bangs inside of my chest like a drum: my heart chanting no, no, no.
Sarah Rose Etter Ripe Scribner 2023 PB 304pp $39.95
Gail Parent Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York The Overlook Press 1972, 2004.
Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.
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