My love affair with corporate America started out like many ill-fated dalliances—with the intention it would be fun, short-lived, and I’d walk away unscathed. During my first year out of college, I worked in publishing and after my first editorial profit and loss meeting, realized it wasn’t the best place for an aspiring writer to work. Back then, it wasn’t unusual to hear otherwise educated and kind people say things like, “Black and Latinos don’t read or buy books.”
When a college friend called me to tell me there was a job opening at the insurance company where she worked—that paid almost twice what I was making at the time, I figured it was a no-brainer. I was getting ready to apply to M.F.A. programs and as someone who didn’t have a family who could support me financially, what better way to maximize my time as a sell-out than making as much money as possible over the next year and then getting the hell out of dodge? One year turned into twenty years, and when I finally managed to leave corporate America to try to make it as a writer, I did so having lined up my pockets and my retirement plans. It’s now been five years since then, and as more time passes, the more bizarre it seems that I thrived in such a toxic environment.
Staying in corporate America as I struggled to carve a path for my writing career radically transformed my class in American society. But that’s not all I got out of the two decades of working full time. I was left with a lifelong preoccupation with workplace dynamics that has consumed me and my work as a fiction writer.
After my first novel was published—where my protagonist Luz swiftly loses her job in the first chapter and must redefine who she is in the absence of work—I wanted to turn my attention to tackling the complexities of a job while my central characters were still in it. In The Grand Paloma Resort, I decided to follow a cast of employees who work in a luxury resort and, through the course of one week, are consistently pushed to become more and more callous at times toward themselves, at other times toward members of their own community. I also wanted to create an atmosphere where it would be clear that work can be a refuge from heartache and isolation, that it is a seductive, life-affirming pursuit.
I’d like to offer you a list and a truth: the defining books of our time are mostly rooted in a person’s relationship to work. Below are seven books that tackle this in a myriad of ways: from views into the lives of a working population during genocidal mandates from the government, to tender illuminations on what it means to be part of a society that fails to count women’s work as labor, to the seduction of wealth and power that lead many of these characters to become complicit in systems that benefit from their own dehumanization, each of these novels offers an unvarnished understanding of an individual’s search for self-actualization through labor.
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
Published in 1998, Danticat’s historical novel follows Amabelle, a young Haitian woman who lives through the 1937 Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic. Amabelle is a domestic worker who lost her parents in the river that would become the setting for tens of thousands of murders decades later. In this lyrical novel, Danticat weaves the present and the past in a dream-like structure, showcasing the fluidity of a border between two countries where most people travelled daily for work and commerce. Danticat is deft at showcasing the class divide between the Haitian workers and the rich Dominicans they work for—here the toxic work environment extends past private homes, beyond sugarcane plantations to encompass an entire country. Early on in the novel, we witness as the death of a sugarcane worker goes unpunished due to the status of the person who commits the crime. Amabelle becomes aware of the intricacies of state-sponsored crimes as her employer is a high-ranking member of the army. As news spreads that the government has unleashed a massacre, we follow Amabelle as she attempts to find her lover and escape death.
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
Cara Romero is a protagonist unlike any other. The novel is a one-sided conversation between a senior citizen, Cara, and a work-place counselor who is attempting to help Cara re-enter the workforce after she has lost her factory job during the great recession of 2007. It becomes clear to the reader that there’s a big difference between being unpaid and out of work. Afterall, Cara works almost non-stop in her community from picking up and dropping off children, to helping feed and care for the elderly and beyond. Yet, the precariousness of her circumstances is exacerbated because the cycle of poverty, housing insecurity, and job insecurity are intricately connected. Cruz is masterful at establishing the gender dynamics that activate one of the biggest rip offs in modern society—women’s work isn’t just unpaid; it is often unacknowledged as true work.
Victim by Andrew Boryga
After witnessing his father’s murder at the tender age of twelve, Javi Perez learns there is much that can be capitalized about victimhood. His teacher offers him a pass to the nurse to deal with his grief, which Javi uses to cut class. Eventually, he learns he can use tragedy to pave the way for his ambitions to become a successful writer, and as his own fountain of tragedy thins, he begins to appropriate and manufacture tragedy in order to scale the echelons of the writing world to much success. This debut is delicious in so many ways. I loved how Boryga tracks Javi’s transformation from victim to victimizer, and how this propulsive path is fueled by greed and ambition. The questions in this book about how personal history can be commoditized and how there is always someone ready to cash in loom large. Those who prosper from stories of victimhood and systemic oppression are rarely those who suffer the most.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
As someone who “sold out” for several decades of my life, there was something wonderfully comforting about seeing that experience reflected to me in Danzy Senna’s hilarious novel, Colored Television. Jane, a mixed-race woman in her thirties, has been suffering as an underpaid academic for decades, waiting to finish a novel that she believes is genius and will launch her into tenure and financial stability. But beyond that, we quickly discover Jane’s true desire is wealth and status because of what she’s been deprived of. When her friend Brett, a successful television writer, allows Jane and her family to move into his mansion to house-sit, she gets to cosplay at being rich. This experience animates her desire to a point where she lies her way into meeting Brett’s television agent and pitching an idea that sounds awfully close to a television show Brett has been developing.
So much of what happens for the rest of the novel felt powerfully insightful for those of us stuck on the bottom rungs, striving. I loved that Jane’s immediate response to being told her novel was a failure was to pivot toward what she considered the life-draining world of television on the way to an easier life. The concrete material goods Jane feels entitled to and cheated of—good schools, a great house in a multi-cultural neighborhood, a finance stress-free life, the right support for her special needs son, an American Girl doll for her daughter—leads directly to exploitation. Senna offers such a wonderful ride that reveals complicity, duplicity, in a wild, page turning narrative.
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn
Dennis-Benn’s debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, follows sisters Margot and Thandi as they struggle to survive in a Jamaican town that largely caters to a tourist economy. Their mother Delores sells trinkets to tourists to support her family and has committed inexcusable acts that placed her daughters in danger. I was most fascinated by Dennis-Benn’s portrayal of older sister Margot, who works at a resort and is also involved in sex work. Once exploited, Margot becomes an exploiter as she hides her deepest desires and identity. She is a difficult character to understand yet so much of what motivates her actions is trying to create a better life for her little sister. Dennis-Benn’s portrayal of the ways siblings attempt to step in for a parent’s shortcoming is poignant. This is a complex novel that digs into the underbelly of tourism, homophobia, and colorism.
The Farm by Joanne Ramos
The Farm is a brilliant debut by Joanne Ramos that follows Jane, a Filipino domestic worker and single mother to an infant daughter named Amalia. When Jane loses her job, her elderly cousin Evelyn “Ate” guides her toward a position at Golden Oaks, a facility referred to as “The Farm” where women serve as surrogates to the wealthy. The payoff for spending the better part of a year to conceive and birth a child is significant. Yet, the sacrifice is to be away from Jane’s own child. The story unfolds in a series of events that help a reader ask profound questions about immigration, class, gender, and race. As Jane’s body becomes commoditized, we understand the interplay between childbearing as an act of survival or the sacred. Ramos does a remarkable job of laying bare the ways that certain paths to progress are closed to immigrants, especially women. It’s a refreshing take on the American Dream.
I’m a Fool to Want You by Camila Sosa Villada
In Camila Sosa Villada’s bold short story collection, I’m a Fool to Want You, the persecuted take center stage in a harrowing series of tales centering exploitation, hatred, and survival. I’ve been teaching this short story collection since it was first released last year. There aren’t many writers I’ve encountered who display such mastery in creating a sensory experience that mirrors the conceit of each of these stories. Many of the protagonists are trans people involved in sex work, but the story collection also reaches toward stories rooted in other types of othering—from a Black little girl facing racism to a straight woman who becomes a girlfriend for hire to her gay friends. Sosa Villada guides the reader with surprising humor and irreverence as she reveals the violence that trans people face. This is a story collection that doesn’t shy away from pushing darker themes that prove revelatory of our current times—when the toxicity isn’t fixed in a place but rather is a state of being for humans, central characters must transcend the human body to survive.
