In the arresting opening scene of Sarah Moss’ new novel, “Ripeness,” we meet Edith, 73, smushed beneath the substantial body of her once-a-week lover, a potter named Gunther.

Lines from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” flit through her mind — “Every woman adores a Fascist” — leading to the reflection that Gunther is hardly a Fascist, unless “his politics are so far to the left he’s come around the other side,” his fierce dedication to veganism butting right against the border.

In the pages that follow, we will spend a great deal of time inside Edith’s head, a busy place, swirling with interesting thoughts, some of which pop right out of her mouth, as in an early scene where she’s thinking about whether a slice of sour cream cake she’s sharing with her friend Méabh is Ukrainian or Jewish in origin (she is Jewish herself). Moss’ style runs the characters’ thoughts and the spoken sentences together, without punctuation:

“She takes another spoonful. People who share recipes, who bake the same birthday cakes, stuff the same flatbreads with the same herbs, are perfectly capable of burning down each other’s houses, raping each other’s daughters and mutilating each other’s sons. The evidence would suggest it’s in all of us, both the baking and the bloodlust. What, says Méabh, it’s just a cake, let’s order another slice.”

It’s dizzying, but in a good way.

Along with Edith at 73, living in rural Ireland, we also meet Edith at 17, in a villa in Italy. In alternating chapters — presented as her first-person narrative — she tells the story of being sent to spend the summer with her sister Lydia, a ballerina, as Lydia awaited the birth of a baby she planned to give up for adoption. That pregnancy is a scandalous situation, perpetrated by the director of the corps de ballet, Igor, whom we hear about but never meet in person.

This younger Edith is just as prone as the elder to philosophical flights of the mind, which come fast and thick as she tries to take in the onslaught of new experiences the summer brings.

“Impossible to hold in one’s head, in one’s seventeen-year-old head, the idea that all the women in the village, all the humans in the bowl of the mountains, along the boot of Italy, across the continent of Europe – never mind the grass and the squirrels – have their own reality, are the central characters in their own worlds, that there are as many tragedies and comedies as entries in the census; I had not, of course, yet learnt that tragedy and comedy, plot and endings, are merely the tools of fiction, fairy tale. Ripeness, not readiness, is all.”

Amid these reveries, much plot unfolds. An unexpected development in 73-year-old Edith’s life turns out to be the inspiration for telling the story of her Italian summer, satisfyingly interlocking the two halves of the novel, and clearing the path toward the fraught but sturdy affirmation of life conveyed by its first and last word, which are both “Yes.”

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Ripeness

By: Sarah Moss.

Publisher: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 296 pages.

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