Beta Vulgaris

Starred review from December 2, 2024
Sarsfield’s ambitious and delightfully bizarre debut portrays the yearning and misfortunes of a white 20-something migrant worker in the Midwest. In September 2014, Elise travels from Brooklyn with her boyfriend, Tom, to work the harvest on a Minnesota beet farm. Both, as Sarsfield wryly puts it, are hoping to return to Brooklyn with the highly valued “social currency” of “hardscrabble Steinbeckian authenticity,” though Elise is genuinely broke while Tom comes from family money. At their camp, they meet a cast of crusty punks, train hoppers, and other seasonal workers, including Sam and his girlfriend, Cee, whom Elise is attracted to. As the grueling labor begins, Elise struggles to come to terms with the wind and cold. She can’t afford new boots, or anything to eat beyond the peanut butter and cheese sandwiches provided at a nearby soup kitchen, which she refuses out of an aversion to processed food. After a mysterious charge on Elise’s credit card deepens her financial woes and causes tension between her and Tom, the beets begin talking to her, or so she thinks (“Return the dirt,” she hears them say). Another voice already in her head, which she attributes to her eating disorder, tells her how worthless she is. When Tom leaves with Cee and doesn’t return, Elise’s hold on reality becomes even more tenuous. Sarsfield perfectly captures the vulnerability Elise feels as a result of being at the mercy of things outside of her control and her terrible sense of self. It’s a knockout.

February 1, 2025
Elise is perpetually broke; harvesting beets is the only option she has to make a decent amount of money in a month, and everyone around her--industry and beets alike--knows it. It seems that evil beet plants are causing the disappearances of harvest workers. Within the first few pages of the novel, however, the reader realizes that evil beets are the least of the problems. The plants are just a stand-in for bigger issues such as class disparity, the inability to afford health care, and the industrialization of farming that preys on those who have few options. With descriptive prose and acutely relatable characters, Sarsfield's debut is actually a master class in how and why people such as Elise, the self-loathing protagonist, get caught up in a system designed to keep them at their lowest points and then exploit that. When Elise ignores a posted warning and listens to what the beets have to say, she is drawn into a horribly inevitable loop that culminates in a predictable but painfully brilliant ending. With Beta Vulgaris, Sarsfield marks herself as a promising voice to watch.

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February 15, 2025
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.

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