BookBrowse Reviews Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield

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A woman travels to work a sugar beet harvest and faces psychological problems after her boyfriend mysteriously disappears.

Beta Vulgaris, the debut novel by Margie Sarsfield, has a deceptively simple plotline: twenty-something Elise and her boyfriend travel from Brooklyn to Minnesota to help out with a beet harvest. They're always struggling for money, and this way they can make enough quickly to cover their rent for a few months. The two seem like a fairly typical Brooklyn hipster couple (Tom is in a band) — their only point of conflict being an argument about whether or not to spend money on a hotel en route. Upon arrival at the camp, they meet the other workers, "crust punks and trustafarians," who are really friendly.

And yet, this manages to turn into a surreal narrative of self-starvation and sugar beet body horror, with a wormy dog and the Bob Seger song "Midnights" threading in and out (as well as a fast-food Italian restaurant called Spaghett About It). Perhaps the novel is most accurately described as an anxiety story: when Elise learns that the aforementioned hotel mistakenly charged her for someone else's long phone call, causing her bank account to overdraft, she begins to spiral. She can't bring herself to tell Tom about the money or to even call the hotel, instead letting her negative bank balance define her worth. Admittedly, I found that achingly relatable, as I did her overall musings about money:

"That lie, if it was a lie, was nothing compared to Elise pretending to be a responsible adult. She felt guilty. She really should check her bank account, open that haunted little app that only ever served to tell her she'd fucked up that month, shouldn't have made that second trip to Trader Joe's, didn't need that ironic vintage T-shirt."

I'm including a trigger warning here — this novel has a lot of eating disorder related content. Throughout the book, Elise purges, lists the calories of every food item she mentions, and comes up with strategies to make food less appetizing (i.e., telling herself that noodles are worms). Her deprivation is so well-rendered that my heart hurts for her as she declines offers of help with this or that, over and over. As someone unafraid to ask for help, I have a lot of sympathy for those who feel they can't, and I understand how deeply ingrained their self-subsistence is.

As the novel progresses, people begin to go missing from the beet harvest camp, most notably Tom. No one really searches for them, and the police don't get involved. But instead of making this about missing persons, Sarsfield focuses more on the facts of their absence. Elise tells Tom's mother and his friends what she knows but she doesn't go looking for him. Instead, she remains at the campsite and worksite, wearing laundry he left behind while working her shifts. When people disappear, it's not like it is in horror movies where a killer is eventually revealed. Instead, it feels somehow passive; absences are noted rather than felt. Which is not to say that everyone is callous. In fact, one thing I enjoyed about this book was that the characters are generally likable, though flawed in the ways that crust punks and trustafarians and Brooklyn hipsters can be.

Ultimately, the disappearances can't be the focus, since Elise's deterioration is the point here. Tom has left her stranded on this beet farm, starving, working all night with harvesting machines, with an overdrawn bank account and a mysterious rash-turned-bruise. I admire the author's attention to detail and how adeptly she varies her prose to show Elise's decline. While the third person limited point of view is very effective, I did hope the author would include some details about the resolution from a more trustworthy character.

I didn't close the book with a sense of resolution or satisfaction. Instead, I was sure I felt soil and bugs on me. (Thankfully all symptoms were psychogenic.) I felt frenzied as well, equal parts because I wanted to help Elise and because the author had written her decline so well. Truth be told, I don't mind a book doing these things to me because it shows the visceral power of the writing. Even if I can never really explain the book, Elise's story will cling to me like dirt on a sugar beet.

This review first ran in the February 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.