The room has no curtains between the beds, which she likes. People talk to each other. A nurse with a felt strawberry clipped in her hair tells her she has really prominent veins, and then that she is a good bleeder, and both land like compliments because nobody has praised her for anything in a while. Two hours later she leaves with fifty dollars, a packet of biscuits and a flyer printed on paper so expensive she notices the card before she reads the words. Fallow by Sarah Anderson begins with a plasma donation and ends somewhere nobody at the reading table will see coming, and the distance between those two points is the whole argument.
A Good Bleeder
Natalie Gallagher, the narrator of Fallow by Sarah Anderson, is twenty-three, one of eleven sisters, and has spent her adult life discovering that there is no such thing as a job she can tolerate.
She staffs an outsourced whistleblower hotline, taking calls from a woman being sabotaged through the coded arrangement of condiment packets at an IHOP, from a security guard describing helicopters sent to watch him, from a man who calls to hear a stranger read his obscene inventions back to him. The work is not cruel to her, exactly. It simply confirms what she already suspected: that employment of any kind is the act of purchasing her own hours back at a loss.
Then a dentist tells her that four wisdom teeth are about to erupt and destroy her jaw, and that it will cost around a thousand dollars she does not have. That is the pressure that starts the novel. Not ambition, not desperation, not ideology. A bill.
The Deal Sarah Anderson Puts on the Table
The flyer leads to an application, and the application is where a group should slow down.
It asks about chronic illness, alcohol, tattoos, and whether she lives with cats. It asks whether she has a partner or close family ties, and whether she has had an abortion, a caesarean, a miscarriage. She answers no to almost everything, including one question where the honest answer is yes, and the ease of that lie is the first thing the reader learns about her.
What she is being screened for, it emerges, is not fertility alone but detachment. Avoidant attachment style. A very low score on something called the Vormelker Scale of Maternal Urges. A body that will do the work and a temperament that will not get attached to the results. Fallow by Sarah Anderson is clear-eyed about this and lets the recruiters say it out loud, cheerfully, as though they were listing qualifications for a warehouse role.
The offer is ten years, seven pregnancies, ninety-two thousand dollars each, housing, food, a completion bonus, and thirty-five thousand in cosmetic surgery at the end to restore what the decade takes. She does the sum standing outside a dental surgery. Ten years of her body, weighed against a lifetime in which she never again has to set an alarm. A group will want to decide, early, whether that calculation is wrong or merely incomplete.
What a Company Means When It Says Equity
The employer is simply the Company, and it does everything, everywhere.
Two years earlier it became one of the first of its size to seat a majority-female executive board, and then discovered that senior women sometimes want families. A slide deck reduces the problem to three headings: financial loss, emotional toll, community erosion. The remedy is one salaried carrier for the whole executive floor, branded as an equity initiative and justified, in a presentation nobody interrupts, by reference to bees and to the Book of Genesis.
The satire in Fallow by Sarah Anderson is broad and it lands anyway, largely because the paperwork is played straight. The contract is reproduced in legal prose: forbidden dyes, forbidden cheeses, forbidden activities, and a bulleted list of emotions the carrier undertakes to avoid, which includes exhaustion, resentment, guilt and grief. Somebody drafted that. Somebody signed it off. The book never needs to point at it.
What keeps all this from being merely a cartoon is that Natalie is not a victim of it in any way she would recognise. She is well housed, well fed, handsomely paid, and genuinely good at the job. She thinks of herself, without irony, as the best in the business. Reading groups who arrive expecting an indictment of surrogacy will find a novel much more interested in the fact that the arrangement works.
Where Sarah Anderson Gives Ground
Fallow by Sarah Anderson is not a flawless book, and the flaws are worth naming before the discussion starts.
- The middle drifts. Seven years go by in a handful of pages, and then the novel settles into a long stretch of appointments, errands and surveillance before the plot properly arrives.
- The villain is a cartoon. A vice president who conducts strategy from an exercise bike and speaks in acronyms is hugely entertaining and carries no menace whatsoever, so the threat must come from the institution standing behind him.
- Some targets are soft. Corporate jargon is well-trodden ground and there is a limit to what can still be got out of a values acronym.
- Passivity is the point and also the problem. A protagonist who refuses to act is precisely what the book is arguing about, and it sometimes asks a reader to sit inside that refusal longer than the refusal can hold.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Begin with the title of Fallow by Sarah Anderson, because the group will not agree on it. The fallow period is the month or more between contracts, when Natalie eats raw fish and deli meat, drinks heavily, takes whatever is offered in a club bathroom, and describes the whole thing as sacred. She points out that fallow land still has to be tilled, that the agitation is what restores it. Ask the table whether that is rest, or whether a rest defined entirely by the work on either side of it is just another shift.
Then ask about the one rule she keeps with her clients: never discuss the money. The contract exists, she says, so that nobody has to acknowledge why she is doing this. Ask whether that protects her or costs her, and ask what happens to a working relationship where one party is free to imagine it is a friendship and the other is not.
Finally, ask the group what they make of her sisters. Ten of them, a mother who never quite remembers which daughter is on the phone, and one sister who sat on a bathroom floor with her at seventeen and listed reasons to want a future. Fallow by Sarah Anderson never states the connection between a childhood spent sharing a room with everybody and an adulthood organised entirely around being left alone. Ask whether it needs to.
Groups who want more in this vein should try The Merge by Grace Walker, which asks similar questions about autonomy and what a person will consent to. Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake suits a table that wants appetite and power handled with the same black humour. Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite is the choice for a group that wants to stay with mothers, daughters and inheritance. And Herculine by Grace Byron works for anyone who finishes this one wanting more communal living gone strange.
Where It Leaves You
The image that stays is a plastic carrier bag of paper cranes.
A woman gives them to Natalie as a gift. They were folded years earlier by that woman’s friends, a thousand of them, while she recovered from surgery, because the tradition holds that a thousand cranes buy you a wish. She is passing them on now, creased and slightly flattened, to the person carrying the thing she wished for. Natalie holds a small yellow one up to her face, studies the folds, and tries to imagine believing in something made of paper. She cannot. She also notes that the cranes did not work the first time, and that regifting them is probably against the rules.
That is the novel’s temperature exactly: a gesture of enormous tenderness, received by somebody who can describe it perfectly and cannot feel it. Fallow by Sarah Anderson spends four hundred pages watching a woman who has rented out the most intimate function of her body insist that nothing has been taken from her, and it is unusually patient about letting her be right for as long as she can manage it. Bring it to a group that enjoys disagreeing. Nobody will finish it at the same place.