Commanding Offices

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Aug 5, 2008

Work seldom becomes the stuff of drama. It's far more likely that, absent a glamorous profession entirely outside of the workaday world, a novelist will ignore or dispense with work entirely — as Joanna Kavenna does at the outset of her Orange Broadband New Writers award-winning Inglorious (Picador). Rosa Lane, successful journalist, embarks on a rather long-winded journey of self-discovery through head-scratchingly bad choices; her journey begins by necessity with a single e-mail in the book's first pages, quitting the job that keeps her grounded.

Kavenna's choice is extreme, but merely in its expediency — with the exception of a handful of books, very few novels treat any kind of work (outside of pulp police work or thriller spying or the occasional crusading Southern lawyer) as more than incidental, a vampire drain on time and energy that happens apart from more real life.

This absence of novelized work makes a book that restricts itself to the 9-to-5, like Ed Park's cubicle opera Personal Days (Random House), shine all the more. Park points out that those dead, stressed hours make up a separate reality: "Week after week, you form these intense bonds without quite realizing it. All that time together adds up: muttering at the fax machine, making coffee runs. The elevator rides. The bitching about the speed of the elevator. The endlessly reprised joke, as it hits every floor: Making local stops. ... We know each other well, but only to a point."

It's a shame that Park's book is actually the second mainly second-person-voiced white-collar layoff satire this year, almost inevitably playing second fiddle to Joshua Ferris' well-reviewed Then We Came to the End (Bay Back Books), released in paperback in the spring. Both books start clever, but Park's observations cut a little deeper and project less self-indulgence; in fact, the final section, a bravura paranoid single-sentence stream-of-consciousness outpouring, shows more skill and contagious joy than any document that also uses "impact" as a verb should.

That both writers can bring out books so similar on the surface points to the fact that publishers are participating in a growing trend of employment-centered entertainment, with Park's and Ferris' anxious drones mirrored in sitcoms and television dramas. (I expect it's no mistake that this season's can't-miss TV show eschews mobsters for a clutch of period Madison Avenue gray suits.)

Even without a Jim-and-Pam backdrop, Ross Raisin's Out Backward (Harper Perennial) would stand out. Raisin's plot is a boy-meets-girl gone-wrong story, and the novel is told through the very rich voice of 19-year-old Sam Marsdyke, with just enough ironic distance from Raisin to make a gently creepy and genuinely beautiful tragedy out of a boy who's very nearly a monster and almost a man, too. Raisin's very deft hand with character and narration are the most important features of his book, and indicate impressive craft and maturity for a first-time novelist. The rocky vocabulary of Sam's Yorkshire commands attention next, followed by Raisin's skillful playing on registers of mistrust between urban and rural types, balancing anti-gentrification screed against shades of Straw Dogs.

Underpinning all of Raisin's excellent portraiture and landscape, though, are the hard facts of work. Sam is a farmer's son. A couple of years after his expulsion from high school and Sam is a farmer, too. And while Sam's occupation doesn't form the book's plot, his lack of sentiment follows directly from his work — work even less often depicted than cubicle drudgery. (I believe the last novelized description of sheep emergencies was done by James Herriot, and much more earnestly.) From the start of the book, Sam bucks against any bucolic view of farming, pelting a group of ramblers with sheep dung because he resents being perceived as one part of a bucolic scene.

What emerges by the end of Marsdyke's story goes beyond simple rebellion against a townie's perception. As Sam moves from grudging obedience toward open disregard of his stern father's commands, and as he makes the difficult choice to ignore his responsibility to his family and his flock, he also faces a terror much more certain if not much different from the layoffs that plague Park's and Ferris' casts: His work, and his opportunity to work, are coming to an end, bought out by gentrifiers and vacationers and people with their own offices who value the land for its view.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

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