Dirty Work by Eyal Press (2021) landed in my stack following an interview with the New York Times Book Review editor. Its subtitle—Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America—summarizes the content aptly, but doesn’t express how un-put-down-able I found this book. Most of the time, when someone makes that clichéd observation—you know the one—about how arresting the scene of something grisly can be, I inwardly roll my eyes. Here, it’s true. The people whose working lives comprise the heart of this volume tell such compelling and horrifying stories that I couldn’t even stop to take notes. Even though it felt like every page contained details worth noting. From drone operators to prison guards to tech employees, these “dirty workers” deserve readers’ attention.
Tamara Shopsin’s LaserWriter II (2021) appealed to the part of me that admires workplace stories; it channels that Halt and Catch Fire energy of the early days in computers, when games lived on floppy disks, and inkjet printers were new-fangled. “Claire prints a test page from the LaserWriter II. The edges of the paper are bright white. They stipple to a black stripe of text in the center, in a kind of reverse ice cream sandwich.” This is as fancy as it gets and that’s pretty action-packed too. It’s a pocket-sized hard-cover novel, with a lot of half-pages instead of chapters, and a few dot-matrix images scattered throughout. In the end, I enjoyed the idea of it more than the story or the writing—but I just kept reading anyway. Almost on automatic. You know, as if the pages were in an endless zigzag of progression or something.
A successful inventor of a clean energy machine, Benedict in Todd Babiak’s The Spirits Up (2021) is suddenly overwhelmed with new possibilities…unprepared for all of it and oblivious to the drama in his wife and daughters’ lives. Throughout the novel, Christmas music is blaring and the stockings are carelessly strewn around the rotating perspectives. The legislative grounds are fully decorated and the Save-on-Foods lot is filled with evergreens, there’s a collection of tomte Santas and a student holiday concert, RuPaul is singing “Hey Sis, It’s Christmas” and mom watches Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas with a glass of wine. ‘[Charlotte] liked this sort of blowing everywhere snow when she could look out at it from inside the warm house, ideally with a cup of hot chocolate.” Except the house isn’t warm now. It’s cold, contaminated even, and there’s no easy way to say it, they’re all haunted: the lights of the squad car are flashing “shamefully against the snow.” Who knew this would be such a fantastic holiday story!
Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021) features a ghost, too but, this time, in a bookstore. Other than, perhaps, a library, a bookshop is my ideal setting for a workplace novel. Erdrich, IRL, runs Birchbark Books in Minneapolis; it’s easy to imagine that there’s a lot of overlap between the list of books that Tookie recommends (her favourites are discussed through the narrative but also are gathered conveniently in a long list at the back of the book) and Erdrich’s favourites. I used to recommend Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse as my favourite bookish novel by this MustReadEverything author, but now there’s competition. (Not really: they’re different.)
Not a bookseller, but a novelist, is at the heart of Hell of a Book by Jason Mott (2021). “But get me alone and ask me what my book’s about and I’m never able to say. Much like my mother, my book has become nothing more than a ghost inside my head.” The daily toil of touring to promote his work is exhausting, and the longer he inhabits this interstitial space, the more inescapable essential questions about identity seem to be. “Reality as a whole—past or present—just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion. There are better ways and places to spend your time.” There are many astute observations about the strange business of writing fiction—“The modern author is only as important as their search results”—and it’s entertaining and engaging throughout.
Creating a narrative that sells: that’s the profession at the heart of Season of Anomy by Wole Soyinka (1973) too. “We wanted fine fine film in technicolor telling the people what a fine fine crop this cocoa is. Fine fine women dancing to fine fine music. Fine fine happy family round the table in every fine fine home. Already you have made cocoa the sine qua whatever you call it in every family.” But Ofeyi feels like this work is a “prostitution of his talents.” His dialogue is impeccable although the exposition requires readers to slow (and/or reread) to admire the detail: “Impassive and expressionless, permanent slits of boredom and disdain served for a pair of eyes.” More than a dozen years after writing this, Soyinka would win the Nobel Prize. (He’s admired greatly by students in Bisi Adjapon’s debut too.)
A marketing professional is at the heart of Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) too. “They brainstormed, bullshitted, performed assorted chicanery, and then sometimes they hit one out of the park.” And, here, he specializes in naming: the process of rebranding creates an ideal opportunity to consider how one can reimagine one’s past by adopting a new identity in the present, in order to create new future possibilities. There are some sharply funny bits (“Do you think Charred and Feathered would be a good name for a chicken joint?”). And even though a decade has passed, these ideas and concerns endure: “He couldn’t argue with America. It was one of those balloon names. It kept stretching as it filled up, getting bigger and bigger and thinner and thinner.”
Jung Yun’s O Beautiful (2021) reminded me, at first, of Toni Jensen’s Carry, for being near the Bakken; then, with the more concentrated focus on the oil industry, I thought of David Huebert’s Chemical Valley, a collection of eleven short stories that broke my heart eleven times (and then I had to reread them, to review the collection for Event). The tone is direct and matter-of-fact, which—layered with the themes of vulnerability and disorienation—sustains the Jensen comparison, even while the looming darkness and sense of alienation is all-Huebert-all-the-time. In the end, however, Jung Yun’s style more resembles the detail-packed women’s stories in Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind, the stories of Clare Boyles, and Nell Freudenberger’s The Newlyweds.
Elinor in Jung Yun’s novel is aiming to launch a career as a freelancer writer, and readers observe working-class life in the Bakken via her investigations. Colson Whitehead’s literary career launched with another workplace story, about elevator inspectors (with the ever-present concept of rising and falling social status), The Intuitionist; his novel John Henry Days (2001) reexamines a figure of 19th-century folklore, a railroad worker, in parallel with a contemporary Black man, working as a journalist. If you’re thinking that’s a wide gap to cross, you’re probably new to Colson Whitehead’s fiction; and, if you’re new to his fiction, you’re probably going to opt for The Underground Railroad instead. But this would be a fine place to begin. My first of his novels was Zone One, which also unfolds in the workplace.
Tomorrow, a Nigerian author’s debut novel from 1965, reissued with a colourful new cover to match the author’s 2021 novel about happiness–ahem–any guesses?
Dirty work sounds fascinating! I will be watching for it on audio…
I love the cover of Spirits Up, and it sounds like fun! I already have my eye on The Sentence (and all her other books!), and Hell of a Book sounds good, too. So many temptations!
I laughed at your “all-Huebert-all-the-time”… it can be a new thing! Lol
TPL has it on audio, so it’s available. Oh, you’d love it. Surprisingly, it also might work for you on audio, even though I get why you lean towards NF for your listening. Hahaha, you’re probably the only person who understood that aside! I still have not recovered. And I’m not sure I’m meant to. With a lot of short story writers, you know how people say “I hope they write a novel”? I hope he never does. I hope he takes up postcard stories.
LOL
Reading your review of the Todd Babiak novel (which I really want to read too!) reminds me that I requested it from the publishers and they never sent it to me. Damn. I really loved his last book, The Idaho something.
I know what you mean about the ‘idea’ of a book, and that can propel me through a book as well. Dirty Work sounds fascinating, I can see why you’d like that too.
I thought of you while I was reading this one because I’m sure you’d enjoy it even more than I did (which was a lot!). Mark it in your calendar for next December: it’s a perfect holiday read.
For anyone who enjoys fiction set in workplaces, Dirty Work would be a great fit, getting under the skin of day-to-day detail in jobs that usually unfold behind closed doors.
Ohh ok that’s good advice, I would like to read it next December.
Funnily enough, I find I like fiction set in workplaces, but also television shows? I was watching one episode of superstore over my lunch hour as a break from work, which is basically the only tv I watch, and then it was removed from Amazon Prime and I was sooo disappointed.
For a moment, I thought you were saying you’d read the Christiana Figueres book next December (in another recent comment thread) and I was thinking, no, no, no, it’s a climate crisis…you can’t waaaaaaiiiittttt that long. LOL
Oh, totally! Superstore is so addictive! It’s on NF now. Corporate. South Side. Insecure. Party Down. Atlanta. Episodes. House of Lies. Corner Gas. In Treatment. A lot of my faves consider the grit and toil of daily working life, whether musicians or caterers.
Glad to hear you liked The Sentence! I had to put a pause on my hold request to avoid a whole pile of books arriving from the library at the same time. I’m hoping to remove the pause in the next few weeks 🙂
I was going to message you about it while I was reading it because the sense of place was so strong for me in this one…but I knew you hadn’t gotten to it quite yet. I’m terrible with managing my holds list (it’s actually just not possible to manage that many books) but now “my” branch is one of the ones closing until the caseloads decrease (44/100 branches can’t be staffed with the present absentee rates), so I’ll be able to get caught up (looking at the bright side).
I remember when daisy wheel printers were newfangled, when all printing was on continuous striped paper, when 20Mb was a (very) big hard disc.I was a software developer from the very first days of ‘IBM compatible’ PCs. The good old days!
I got into computing at a big transport company where, because of unions, the long distance gas tanker drivers earned more than the managing director. Of course, that couldn’t last, and all the plutocrats who put Thatcher and Regan in power made short work of the unions and returned the West to the huge inequalities of wealth we have now which ensures ‘dirty work’ gets done and they don’t have to pay for it.
It’s hard to believe just how much that industry has changed. I used to love tearing off those little printer strips on a nice-sized short story/essay…it felt so satisfying!
That’s ironic. The change in the influence that unions wield here, now, is marked too. And the generation just entering the workforce doesn’t seem to have much understanding of the potential there (which, of course, works in the favour of corporations) unless they’ve grown up in a union family!
Fascinating roundup! Dirty Work sounds really compelling. I’m very interested in how we outsource difficult or unethical work to others, but still want it to be done. I wonder how many death penalty supporters, for example, would actually be able to be the executioner.
Exactly. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we define “choice” and how we often want to imagine that people are making choices because there is a benefit that outweighs the cost (in your example, maybe the idea that that executioner is highly paid, though that’s not true), whereas really, it’s not a free choice.
I share your interest in workplace fiction and like the sound of Laser 11. I didn’t know that Louise Erdrich was also a bookseller! The Sentence is going straight on my list.
Colson Whitehead is great for that too; even with his zombie novel, it feels like a workplace novel (Zone One) and in his coming-of-age novel (Sag Harbor) there is a surprising amount of detail about his summer job in an ice-cream parlour. Here’s the link for Birchbark Books.