Babies are the crop in Joanne Ramos’ ‘The Farm’

Life at Golden Oaks sounds like a dream: long walks in the woods, lazy summer afternoons by the pool, the freshest organic dishes for every meal, massages on demand, attentive medical care and fitness trainers, every need catered.

So you have to follow some rules. So you have to leave your old life behind for nine months. What’s a little freedom compared with this life of luxury?

Turns out, it’s everything in Joanne Ramos’ frightening literary debut “The Farm” (Random House, 326 pp., ★★★☆).

The women at Golden Oaks, aka The Farm, aren’t guests, they’re livestock, hydrated and exercised, pumped with vitamins and swathed in cashmere. The Farm’s crop? Human babies, grown at a pretty price for the world’s uber wealthy in these wombs for hire.

Jane is the ideal Host. She’s Filipina, always a popular choice among Golden Oaks’ clientele. She’s a single mother who already has carried her own baby to term, so they know her womb is in working order. Best of all, she’s desperate. Recently separated and fired from her nannying job, she’ll do anything to give her baby daughter a life better than her own, and they know it. “She needs her bonus, and she loves her daughter. Those two things will keep her in line.”

Mae, the Farm’s ruthlessly ambitious director, is so certain of Jane’s qualifications that she entrusts her with Golden Oaks’ most valuable embryo, that of aging billionaire benefactor Madame Deng who could take their operation to the next level and land both Mae and Jane a hefty bonus so long as they produce the perfect baby.

What Mae doesn’t count on is the human factor – the stress of constant surveillance, the conspiratorial cliques that form in confinement. And what Jane doesn’t count on is being so desperate to connect with her toddler daughter back home that she’ll put everything she has sacrificed at risk.

Born in the Philippines and Princeton-educated, Ramos worked in investment banking and private-equity investing before turning novelist, life experiences that no doubt gave her the insight to write so convincingly of both worlds. Ramos ably toggles between hardworking Philippine immigrants who can’t seem to get a foothold on American prosperity and the monied elite who take advantage of the widening class divide.

In lesser hands, Mae would read like a cartoon villain. Yet Ramos writes her with enough depth that the career woman reads as much a product of her environment as Jane.

The social commentary is blistering but at times gratingly, unnecessarily explicit, stating its thesis through characters that sound like they’re talking at us instead of to each other.

An appalled friend of one of the Hosts exclaims, for example, “Surrogacy – this kind of surrogacy! – is a commodification, a cheapening! Everything sacred – outsourced, packaged, sold to the highest bidder!”

It’s forgivable, though, that the book is so eager to make its point.

Because what’s so striking about “The Farm” isn’t that it imagines a frightening dystopia.

This isn’t a hundred years in the future, it’s next week. This is reality, nudged just a touch to its logical extreme.

Its plausibility is a warning shot.