Dear readers, There’s a stereotype that New Yorkers will ask about your line of work within 90 seconds of meeting. It’s not our fault! One upshot of living in a major urban center is the exposure to totally idiosyncratic occupations. Just think about David Sedaris’s Macy’s-elf exposé, and all the poor souls you pass dressed as tacos or bowls of ramen on the street. The pursuit of money can lead us in intriguing, mysterious directions. One of my closest friends is a thesaurus editor (there are new synonyms?). Another is a transportation planner, while someone else is an insight-chaser and innovator, at least according to his company’s website. Today I write about two excellent novels that capture the precarity and peculiarity of employment, through the eyes of a disaffected bookseller and a temp who changes vocations at a frenetic pace. Work is absurd, fascinating and alarming. Can I blame Mr. Rogers for whetting my appetite about jobs? No one bothered to teach me about Marx while I was in a high chair. —Joumana “Temporary,” by Hilary LeichterFiction, 2020
A loopy, demented intelligence powers this debut novel, about a woman who works a series of ludicrous temp jobs. Among her posts: living mannequin in a store window, jackhammerist, stand-in for a local mural artist. She is tasked with carrying the ashes of a former board chair, because he likes to be a man about town, and later sent to work on an unspecified nautical voyage. Like all good satirists, Leichter has an ear for accepted inanities, and knows how to torque them to the extreme. One boss is “the type to pontificate and listicle,” then assert that “working remotely is what we call being dead.” For the record: He works on a pirate ship, not in media. The novel’s conditions are occasionally harrowing in ways that force us to question our present realities. (“Temporaries measure their pregnancies in hours, not weeks. We’re employed at an hourly rate, and we gestate in the same manner.”) And when the desired goal for our narrator is permanence — as opposed to, say, a happy relationship like those in the marriage plots of yore — you get the feeling that something has gone truly wayward in the 21st century. In Leichter’s universe workers describe consistent employment as something akin to falling in love, or menopause: “That shiver, that elevated pulse, that prickly sweat, the biology of how you know it’s happening to you.” They call it “the steadiness.” Mostly, though, the dream of a regular gig seems far off, especially when an unmoored temp — professionally and literally at sea — is heaving into a bucket. Soldier on, comrade! Read if you like: Sad clowns, “Pure Colour,” Shelley Duvall’s “Faerie Tale Theatre.” “Service,” by John TottenhamFiction, 2025
I firmly believe everyone should work at least one customer-facing job in her lifetime. It prepares you for the wide range of human aberrance, for starters, and also drives home the importance of basic decency. Sean, the narrator of Tottenham’s debut novel, would probably disagree. He’s a bookseller at a painfully hip bookstore in Echo Park, Los Angeles, which he’s watched evolve into an oasis for rich, thin-skinned customers with pedestrian tastes. He is also, ostensibly, a writer, though his novel has yet to materialize. (You know Sean is an auteur because he uses phrases like “feckless heliolatry” and “atrabilious humor.”) His lack of output is the source of deep, psychic pain, particularly when his contemporaries manage to publish books or achieve other life milestones. He has sacrificed a good deal for his art, with little to show for it but compounding debts and the feeling he is the last bohemian standing after capitalism mowed down everyone else. Fortunately for us, this bitterness has congealed into a wicked sense of humor. The first few pages describe the agony of determining whether a customer needs a bag for his purchase, which is about as accurate a depiction of the doldrums of retail that you can get. A running theme is Sean’s consistently poor reviews on Yelp; one customer complains that his dour temperament felt like an intimate violation. “It was all so dispiriting,” Sean says, over and over, like a West Coast Bartleby, but much funnier. Read if you like: “Daria,” hair shirts, treating exclamation points with scorn We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
|
