Like Yesteryear , but Better

How’s this for a job offer? In the span of no more than 10 years, you’re to have seven babies for C-suite women at a major tech firm.

You’ll be on a strict diet and exercise regime, your vitals constantly monitored.

You can’t have sex.

Or a C-section (lest you forgo the “natural birth bonus”).

Nor can you tell your loved ones what your actual job is (as far as they’re concerned, you’re in “consulting”).

You’ll get just six months of downtime between pregnancies.

And, as the test case for this “groundbreaking pilot program” to make The Company “the world’s most equitable workplace,” you’ll earn more than a million dollars.

In Natalie, the narrator of Sarah Anderson’s very funny debut novel, Fallow , The Company finds a taker—one who isn’t, readers soon discover, quite the sucker she may seem to be.

She’s a recent college graduate, wryly aware that she is not the typical striver.

Motherhood versus career is not a dilemma that haunts her, which gives her an unusually deadpan perspective on angst about work-life balance.

Anderson does more than skewer corporate posturing; she shows Natalie stumbling into unexpected insights about freedom and entrapment.

At 23, Natalie is employed in a soulless call center, fielding complaints on a hotline for disgruntled employees in many spheres, but when her family expresses concern about her future, she says, “I don’t need a path.

I have a path.

I just need money.” Her job has enough upsides—flexible hours, livable pay, and her friend Libby, who “regularly dosed the communal break-room coffee with CBD oil”—that she might have languished in it forever.