If you work 40 hours a week, you spend about a third of your waking hours at work. When you add the time you spend commuting to work, complaining about work, and stressing about work, you’re looking at half of your conscious life spent in the workplace.
I’m fascinated by how much of our lives we spend working—and how rarely we get into the details. How many of your friends could describe how you spend your typical workday? We act as though work is boring, and yet, at every job I’ve ever held, my workday has been filled with tiny bursts of drama, ferocious irritations, minor victories, and long-standing power struggles.
In my debut novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay, I wanted to capture what the workday feels like minute by minute. What is it like to stand behind the counter of a bakery for eight hours, exchanging hundreds of pleasant greetings? What is it like to sit through a therapy appointment with client after client, assuring them all that they’re making progress? The novel’s omniscient narrator follows an ensemble cast through small-town life in Appalachian Ohio, from home to work to the places in between, as the characters wrestle with the vocations they’ve given half their lives to—all while wondering whether they’ve made the right choice.
I love writers who can bring an unfamiliar workplace to life. In these eight novels, the daily grind is presented in obsessive, sometimes absurdist detail, turning the familiar into something uncanny and worth studying.
There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, translated by Polly Barton
After a case of severe burnout at her last job, the unnamed protagonist of this novel tells an employment agency that she wants to find an easy job with very little drama and a lot of sitting. Luckily, such a job exists: monitoring live video surveillance of a reclusive writer, who is suspected to have hidden contraband in his office. But the protagonist quickly discovers that this seemingly mindless job comes with its own strange drawbacks—as do all the jobs she tries next. From a luxury cracker company to a hut in the forest, from writing bus ads to hanging up posters, the protagonist can’t seem to stay detached from the outsized enthusiasm, obsession, and vigor that possesses her coworkers. “I didn’t want to have any more feelings about my work than were strictly necessary,” she laments. But in the modern workplace, emotional labor is an unspoken part of the job description. The daily grind in this novel is absurd as well as intimately recognizable, and weirdly engrossing. It’s hard not to care about work, it turns out, even when you’re reading about someone else’s.
The New Me by Halle Butler
Millie is as stuck as a failed-to-launch millennial can get. She has a good education, but has ended up in a series of dispiriting temp jobs. Her parents help pay for her apartment, while Millie can barely bring herself to cook or clean. She hates everyone, but she’s also lonely. She puts people off with her lack of effort, but when she makes an effort, that puts people off too. The only way out that Millie can see is the glimmer of a full-time job offer—but as she devotes herself to secretarial work, the reader catches on that even this slight hope is not what it seems. The New Me is relentless in its exposure of the hollowness of workplace culture, and of the void where any alternative fulfillment would go.
Superfan by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
It may seem that performing on stage to thousands of adoring fans is an ideal job. And yet, in Superfan, Jenny Tinghui Zhang captures the daily grind of a beloved boy band: hours of choreography, eating and sleeping on a schedule, getting shunted from cars to hotel rooms and back into cars, coached before every interview. Even in their free time, the boy band is beholden to their fans, posting seemingly candid videos to social media, and stoking their fans’ feeling of personal connection. This novel will not make you want to join a boy band—on the contrary, it shows how much labor goes into forming and maintaining a parasocial relationship from both ends. The boys in the band must continually hawk their stage personas through bite-sized bits of media, and the fans must comb through all the footage and interviews and performances to catch some glimpse of the real people inside those personas. It’s a ton of work on both sides, and the reward of all that work is that you get to do more of it.
Severance by Ling Ma
On its surface, Severance is a pandemic novel—but it is most precise and haunting in its critique of our relationship to work. Candace Chen works at a book publisher, where she coordinates the printing of expensive custom bibles and envies her much cooler colleagues, the Art Girls. As the mysterious Shen Flu virus begins to shut down businesses around the world, the protagonist accepts a lucrative offer: She’ll keep coming into the New York office for another year, in exchange for a hefty severance package. Even as the world ends, she is sending follow-up emails, tolerating the two-hour, then three-hour, then four-hour commute into work, and wandering the silent streets of Manhattan. Until one day she locks herself out of the office and it hits her: The city around her is empty, and she is the only one left. Severance captures the curious inertia of the salaried job, especially those jobs where the work is meaningless enough to justify leaving, but the money is good enough to justify staying.
Stoner by John Williams
William Stoner gives himself entirely to the work of loving and teaching literature. In so doing, he alienates students, battles with colleagues, dooms his marriage, and dies unremembered. It is impossible to read the account of the small victories and painful setbacks of Stoner’s life without both rooting for him and resigning oneself to his eventual disappointment. This novel maps out the long and embattled path of academia, from youthful ambition to cutthroat office politics to the fading of relevance. Through it all, Stoner somehow continues to love teaching, and to value the opportunity he has to discuss literature with successive generations of students. Stoner is a compassionate and unsparing view of the life of professors, and shows how even this apparently cushy daily grind has its share of hard and thankless labor.
The Adjunct by Maria Adelmann
For a fresh take on the grind of academia, try Maria Adelmann’s new novel The Adjunct. The protagonist, Sam, is an overworked and underpaid adjunct professor, frantically seeking to make ends meet as the ghosts of her past crop up and complicate things. The professor she once had a not-quite-affair with has written a book that everyone thinks is about her, and meanwhile she’s got to stay on top of five classes and eventually somehow pay off her credit card bill. Written in unsparing, furious detail, The Adjunct is a deep and perilous dive into the plight of the modern adjunct, from side hustles, to parking fees, to late nights grading, to the dangled carrot of a real, stable, full-time job.
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
A struggling grocery store takes on an assistant for the first time. And as if by magic, sales begin to increase. Frank is charismatic, optimistic, full of fresh ideas and fearless of change. He is also driven by his own agenda, and a murky past he doesn’t wish to discuss. As the owner of the shop gradually comes to trust and then depend on Frank, it seems that the shop may be saved from irrelevance and eventual bankruptcy. But Frank hasn’t quite escaped his past, and in all his improvements to the shop, he hasn’t been entirely honest. This novel is a masterpiece of the daily grind: You won’t believe how deeply you care about whether the grocery store pulled in $1.25 or $1.50 that day. Relentlessly attentive to the minutiae of small business ownership, The Assistant is both grounded and riveting.
The Employees by Olga Ravn
A mixed crew of humans and humanoids travels through space. Their assigned task is to guard and observe a roomful of alien “objects,” which exert a strange pull over the crew. For the humans, the objects seem to stir up memories of a deeply buried past. For the humanoids, the objects give rise to unprecedented nostalgia and longing. The novel is the collected testimony of these human and non-human workers, as they gradually lose their grip on the productivity grind that has driven their lives, and begin to dream (when it’s nearly too late) of some elusive humanity. Because the speakers are never definitively identified—we don’t even know with certainty which are human and which are robots—their testimonials blend into a portrait of the workday on this rocket ship 100 years into the future. Despite how surreal and shadowy that portrait is, it’s still recognizable—I’ve certainly felt, amidst the slog of a long workday, the faint stirrings of my own humanity.
