PositiveDefectorShrewd, satirical ... Natalie’s journey with The Company, however far-fetched it may first appear, is not very far removed from our current reality at all ... Fallow, to its credit, is not satisfied with a patriarchal critique of the contemporary and the framing of Natalie as a martyr for womankind in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale’s surrogacy plot ... That said, the novel rather notably does not contend with how much technological and gestational labor is ultimately outsourced to the global South in the contemporary, limiting the scope of its imagined liberation to a relatively deracialized global North. Natalie herself is a middle-class white woman—albeit downwardly mobile—and the subject of race and its intricate dynamics with respect to childbirth and surrogacy are mostly absent from the novel.
