Anderson is most incisive about the physicality of wealth, and the romance of financial choices ... The book is most subversive and surprising not in its vision of the workplace, but in its portrayal of female friendship and love. Natalie’s sisters are practically strangers; her friends are co-workers or antagonists or both, everything mediated by a paycheck. Even Natalie’s mother abdicates the challenges of mothering, despite the opportunities Natalie gives her. In its wonderful, wily final act, Fallow asks what it would mean to truly carry the women around you, and what it might cost to be carried in return.
Very funny ... In prose that is sharp and entertaining, Anderson refreshingly takes on several familiar themes at once: the hidden tolls that working women still face, the stranglehold of Big Tech, the Orwellian nature of corporate-speak, the relentless self-monitoring of wellness culture ... Anderson’s vision is at once outlandish and recognizable ... Anderson captures the way our tech-driven world pulls us into an absurd social experiment that cuts us off not only from others, but also from ourselves ... If this all sounds a little too tidy or corny, rest assured that you’re in good hands.
Darkly comic ... Matter-of-fact hilarity ... There’s a jarring tonal shift from the first section, which tracks Natalie’s career as a detached, high-priced handmaiden, to the soulful second half when the scene changes to a feminist commune with Natalie as an aggrieved resident. One would also like to know a bit more about Natalie’s parents and her 10 (yes, 10) sisters, who are all quite distant figures. This seems a missed opportunity. Fortunately Ms. Anderson avoids the pitfall of tipping into gooey sentimentality while allowing for the possibility of spiritual rebirth.
A humorous send-up of contemporary corporate culture and examination of motherhood ... A fun, easy-to-read exploration of the limits of capitalism, motherhood, and friendship. It’s a little bit weird but in ways that are entertaining and sarcastic ... Delivers a cleverly plotted story with characters who grow in unexpected ways.
Shrewd, 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.
Witheringly funny ... Fallow is a novel about surrogacy, but is also explicitly about work more broadly ... In its withering critique of work in all its more banal forms, Fallow suggests that unscrupulous bosses and our economy’s callous disregard for workers, not Natalie’s choice of labor, are the far more pressing problems.
Unfolding into an utterly unexpected journey, Anderson’s debut novel is an engrossing commentary on workplace culture, autonomy, and late-stage capitalism.
Darkly funny ... Though the pacing feels uneven, with most of the action occurring in the novel’s latter half, Anderson sustains an absurd yet disturbingly realistic critique of corporate America. This dystopian tale is as sharp as it is moving.
