Ripeness, by Sarah Moss review: 'feels somehow fabricated' (2025)

This is a terribly accomplished novel, and I am unsure if that is a compliment or a criticism. It has an affecting core scenario, some extremely engaging writing, some very interesting observations; and yet I found it, at some gut level, manufactured, or as if it had palpable designs on eliciting a particular response. Moss has written eight other novels, and is much admired by novelists whose opinion I respect, and yet this felt somehow fabricated. It has the kind of realism that makes you mistake a Blaschka glass flower for the real thing.

Ripeness has one central character but two distinct modes. In the present day and the third person, Edith is living in rural Ireland, divorced but in a happy and uncomplicated relationship with a German Marxist potter. A friend of Edith’s is contacted by a possible step-sibling, and this triggers first-person recollections of her unusual gap year in the 1960s, away from her father’s Derbyshire farm, when before going to Oxford she was in Italy, attending the final weeks of her glamorous, ballet dancer sister Lydia’s unwanted pregnancy.

The reader is, of course, supposed to see the visible seams stitching the stories together. There is an element of intrigue in that the first person reminiscence is addressed to an initially nebulous “you”: “I should be clear that I’m not the one you want either. You shouldn’t get your hopes up. We’ll come to that”. The reader is, in effect, reading a private correspondence (and the identity of the addressee is not exactly difficult to discern). The rise of personal computers even means that the “letter” is not at the credulity-stretching length of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Likewise, the third person sections slip effortlessly into close focus, internal monologue; as if the whole novel is an intrusion of sorts.

Moss’s previous works have a feature (not quite a formula) of setting political events against the personal. The Fell had the lockdown, Summerwater had Brexit amongst other apocalypses, Ghost Wall had Iron Age re-enactment alongside un-pretend toxic masculinity and The Tidal Zone featured an NHS in crisis paralleled to the post-war rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. This time, the ideas of home, belonging and inheritance are sufficiently baggy to have debates about “good” (Ukrainian, white) refugees versus African ones alongside the intimate details of adoption, empty nests and disconnection. I am always uncertain if such neat matrices of meaning arise naturally from a narrative, or are trimmed and stapled to fit. Indeed, I am increasingly sceptical about the “aboutness” of novels.

The ballet, and to a lesser extent the pottery, offer a lexicon of terms and a stock of images that can be co-opted for symbolism. The idea, for example, of the “kinesphere” – “the space claimed by bodily movement” – is a readymade image to be translated onto various poses, postures, intimacies, indignities and distances.

The title is again semantically fully loaded. It is literal in the figs, “which I only knew dried and chopped in suet puddings” (a choice little piece of characterisation), to the metaphor for pregnancy as well as the cusp-y nature of the younger self, through to a sense of late life fulfilment. It appears within the text in a strange (and extremely clever) aside. Moss/Edith has noted the curious parallel of Hamlet’s “the readiness is all” and Edgar in King Lear’s “Ripeness is all” – prefaced by “men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither”, appropriately enough. Much could be said about this, but isn’t. Edith says she “managed to get into my Oxford entrance exam, my idea that Lear is a darker play than Hamlet”. Ye-e-e-e-es: but it’s hardly an original idea that Lear is darker than Hamlet. Samuels Johnson and Taylor Coleridge would agree. Are we supposed to read this ironically, as evidence of Edith’s naivety and unearned superiority? But it is, with the limits of the novel, written by the elderly Edith: is she concurring? Unaware?

There are many memorable, shrewd notes: a marble bathroom is “a room carved out of Stilton cheese”, Edith chafes at A-level Italian including terms for “nuclear deterrent” but not nappy, a child’s “sea-anemone mouth”. Young Edith brims with Eliot, Brontë, Milton and Hopkins in a convincing way, although the Older Edith talking about her friends “Dearbhla from the Samaritans, and… Clare from a short-lived Dante reading group, Clare who was from the North via Modern Language at Cambridge” seems almost parodic. More seriously, there is a backstory about Edith’s errant mother, who avoided the Holocaust and ends up on a kibbutz, which may have broad links to bohemianism, identity, duty versus free-spiritedness, but smacks of being the kind of thing that tends to occur in novels.

Towards the end, Edith muses that “Wouldn’t it have saved the Third Reich some work, to be able to pull us all from a spreadsheet?” It’s a throwaway line except IBM/Dehomag did precisely that. The patina of ballet references have a similar feel, and many of the ways in which they are deployed – weightlessness, elegance, pain – are handled more full-heartedly in a novel like Amélie Nothomb’s The Book of Proper Names. Although there is much to appreciate here, it would be remiss not to warn the reader that it ends rather bathetically.

Ripeness, by Sarah Moss, Picador, £20