About halfway through Sarah Rose Etter’s bleak sophomore novel, “Ripe,” its 33-year-old narrator poses this dictum to the reader: “A single choice made with the best intentions can become a terrible life. Imagine biting into a seemingly ripe fruit, only to have your mouth filled with rot.”

It’s a fitting comparison for the book — and, many readers might argue, for capitalist America. In both cases, what seems bright and shiny and filled with promise on the surface is really soaked through with misery, misfortune and pain.

As she did in her Shirley Jackson Award-winning debut, “The Book of X” — a novel about a woman born with a literal and figurative knot in her stomach who gets beaten down by body issues and work anxieties — Etter opens “Ripe” with an onslaught of visceral imagery that stays at a fever pitch all the way through.

The book’s narrator, Cassie, is on her way home from her thankless job as a lead marketing writer at Voyager, a tech startup in Silicon Valley that uses data to target users and influence them to buy things online. As she steps off the train and heads toward her overpriced downtown San Francisco apartment where she lives alone, a man sets himself on fire as she walks by.

In this soul-crushing, immolation-inducing version of the city, “the rich live inside tall town homes, the poor live in faded dirty tents if they are lucky, there are boarded-up businesses next to new juice bars, people either defecating in the streets or buying gourmet groceries, eating at overpriced restaurants or out of the dumpsters in the back alley.”

令人沮丧的事实是,卡西的过高,关爱rworked life in the Bay Area doesn’t seem all that extraordinary — and that’s certainly Etter’s point. In a city full of screen-obsessed “husks” and “Believers” who take helicopters to Burning Man and live in souped-up RVs parked outside their angel-funded employer headquarters, Cassie’s habits of doing a bump of coke before work to get through the day despite potentially being unexpectedly pregnant or taking Xanax at night before going out drinking with her peripheral friends or on a date with a self-absorbed crush who’s already in an open relationship are par for the course.

What’s more, her loaded “motivational” chats with her designer-yoga-pants-wearing, green-smoothie-drinking, industry-mantra-quoting (read: gratingly vapid) boss or Voyager brass’ closed-door meetings about top secret data breaches to take down competitors in the uncompromising pursuit to get ahead might seem outlandish to some, but to Cassie they’re just another repetitive day in a mind-numbing, demoralizing grind.

“My life in San Francisco started as a trickling stream of clear, pristine water,” Cassie explains in her first-person narration that permeates the book. “Within weeks, it was a swollen, polluted river. … I was choking beneath the surface, a hand outstretched, mouth full of filth, treading water, fighting for breath.”

As fans of “The Book of X” can attest, taking in Etter’s explosive, often grotesque prose in one sitting isn’t for the faint of heart. In a weird way, reading “Ripe” feels like being hit over the head with a cast-iron frying pan, then willingly going back for more.

Still, there are delicate moments sprinkled in if you can get through all the office politics, dire state-of-the-world commentary and social drama. Cassie’s calls with her loving though out-of-touch father, albeit brief, add a vulnerable side to Cassie that’s key to seeing her as human and balance out her train-wreck personality.

Though the Notes & Research sections on Stephen Hawking’s work on quantum physics throughout the book seem like a needless distraction, and the chapter-heading definitions for words like “sex” and “motivation” veer toward gimmicky, the passages devoted to describing Cassie’s constant companion — a giant black hole visible only to her that feeds on her angst, expanding or contracting in relation to her suffering — work as a palpable metaphor for depression.

Etter’s true-to-life depiction of Cassie’s abortion and its aftermath is worth a gander, too. Her clear-eyed portrayal of the harrowing ordeal serves as a powerful reminder of yet another right we Americans have given up in this post-Roe world — the freedom of choice and equal access to necessary, life-affirming resources.

亚历克西斯修布是一个自由撰稿人.