Capitalism and parenting are incompatible. Motherhood demands the time and energy capitalism normally exploits for a profit. But what if big business could mitigate the impact of a pregnancy by providing highly paid employees an alternative, a person to carry the child, eliminating the burden of pregnancy? Revenue retained, employees satisfied, all for the low cost of a staff surrogate. Sarah Anderson’s debut novel, Fallow, explores the premise in a humorous send-up of contemporary corporate culture and examination of motherhood.
Narrator Natalie has a toothache, but lacks the funds or dental insurance to properly address the situation. Her need for fast cash brings her to an experimental program run by The Company, a big tech conglomerate. She accepts a job offer to serve as a surrogate, gestating and birthing 7 children for the Company’s high-ranking employees. She’s provided a salary, housing, and, while pregnant, oversight of her diet, exercise, and medical treatment. Between pregnancies, in her fallow period, her only responsibility is recovering her fertility to repeat the process. Each vaginal birth earns her a bonus, and upon completing her final delivery, a life-changing sum.
Natalie, who is one of 11 daughters, sees this occupation as an easy way to avoid a genuinely challenging job, and hopes ultimately to retire with a substantial nest egg. After six successful babies, she encounters a complication with her final child. Jackie, the woman whose child Natalie is carrying, is terminated by The Company. The surrogacy perk promised Jackie also ends with her employment. For Natalie, this means she’s expected to terminate the pregnancy and start again to complete her contract.
Big tech companies in recent years have prided themselves on reinventing existing things, like ride-sharing services realizing the efficiency of buses and rebranding mass transit. In the case of The Company, they have reinvented surrogacy. Surrogacy in America is an expensive process. Independent contractors typically work with couples who are struggling to conceive rather than trying to avoid pregnancy, although there are examples of celebrities like Kim Kardashian employing gestational surrogates. Natalie is enthusiastic, but mostly because she gets to live alone in a luxury apartment. What she doesn’t really see at first is how The Company exerts control over her and her body.
At the center of this novel are questions of money and power. The Company espouses the liberation surrogacy provides employees. They promise a successful program will reverse declining birthrates because employees, especially women, will not be burdened by pregnancy. The careers of female executives will thrive once they are liberated from the birthing process. But in order to enact their program, they rely on the exploitation of Natalie, who seemingly has little choice but to surrender herself to the opportunity.
Natalie’s gilded birdcage is one she steps into eagerly. But when the restrictions of The Company are lifted during her fallow period, she celebrates with sex, drugs, and alcohol. It’s a direct response to the rigidity of the oversight of her pregnancies. Working the job provides her with the funds to live her best life, and she embraces the freedom right up until The Company reveals how they have watched her during this downtime. Suddenly, what seemed like harmless fun is wielded against her and threatens to undo her promised bonus.
Anderson shows us the flipside of capitalism’s aggressive exploitation when Jackie kidnaps Natalie and brings her to a commune of mostly women who farm and sell homemade tofu and goat-milk soap. This utopia is built on shared labor, democracy, and trust among the members. It’s the ideal. The commune’s mission is meant to escape the petty exploitation of the corporate world, yet the members still vote to forcibly bring Natalie into the community in the hopes of leveraging her for their own goals. Ultimately, they exert the same force to exploit Natalie. As a critique, Anderson has delivered us an insightful challenge to competing ideologies. Both societal structures are capable of evil.
What makes this novel work is the soothing narrative point of view Natalie provides, bringing us along on her rollercoaster of a journey. Anderson has a strong sense of narrative pace with the correct comedic beats to deliver prose that is both readable and entertaining.
The book is not speculative fiction. Everything that does happen could be happening right now. And yet, there is a sense that Natalie lives in a dark dystopia, only here we can recognize it as the world we live in. Surrogacy seems like a perk that fits in alongside on-site yoga classes and free dinner in the cafeteria. Nevertheless, there are moments when it seems like the novel wants to dip into more fictional science, especially when it comes to the sperm used to impregnate Natalie.
The sperm is one of many untidy strings. At times, there does seem like a risk that many of these plotlines could have ended up like the four-toed statue in Lost, a tangent that creates a mystery that is never returned to.
There are unanswered questions. Natalie’s many sisters are more of a quirky backstory than a presence in the novel. The sperm producing the babies Natalie carries has an increasingly questionable provenance. The simmering public outcry dissipates without explanation. But somehow Anderson succeeds in introducing these unresolved plot points without those mysteries becoming unsettling. Much of that success can be pinned to Natalie’s character development, especially as she shifts from being a person with weak interpersonal relationships to being someone who is deeply connected to the people around her. And it’s these relationships that drive the novel. We end up caring more about how Natalie mends her friendships than we do about these other issues.
Fallow was 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. The book disguises cultural criticism in humor, supported by a sympathetic everywoman who is easy to relate to, even in her extraordinary circumstances. Fallow delivers a cleverly plotted story with characters who grow in unexpected ways. And while parenting might be made easier with substitutes, Anderson reminds us too of how children can inspire our own growth as people.
FICTION
Fallow
By Sarah Anderson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published September 15, 2026
