BETA VULGARIS

In this debut novel, a young Brooklyn couple become seasonal sugar beet harvesters in Minnesota to earn some serious scratch.

Recent college graduate Elise is in debt—she can’t even afford her antidepressants—although she doesn’t tell her boyfriend, Tom, nor does he know about her longtime eating disorder. Elise is grateful for the opportunity to make good money with Salt of the Earth Sugar, plus she sees harvest work as “a real life experience. Something they could say they’d done when they got back to Brooklyn, where hardscrabble Steinbeckian authenticity was social currency.” At the campground where she and Tom park their camper, Elise meets “hot and cool” queer girl Cee, another seasonal worker; develops a crush on her; and fears that Tom has done the same. (Elise’s preoccupation with being cool can be amusing and is presumably intended to play as merely juvenile rather than mockable.) One day, at a nearby church that offers harvesters free meals, Elise sees a sign that reads “The beets can only hurt you if you LISTEN to them!!!!,” and before long she’s hearing a voice in her head that says “Return the dirt.” Sarsfield’s writing is sturdy throughout, and the farm setting and duties are vividly rendered, but the novel doesn’t seem to know where to go with its surreal turns, which come to include the disappearance of harvest workers. Elise’s self-pity can be tiresome, and her self-destructive tendencies, which include erratic spending, can be wearying, but readers won’t draw any conclusions about Elise that she hasn’t already drawn; she thinks of herself as, quite perfectly, “an expert in egomaniacal self-hatred, the dark art of inventing new and spectacular ways to feel bad.”

A promising and well-written quasi-speculative story runs aground under the weight of its protagonist’s self-absorption.