Workers

Yup someone else has noticed:

In search of novels about working life

Work’s relative absence from the novel is all the odder when you consider its absolute ubiquity. Not only is it a universal leveller, it is also one of the great venues for social interaction. Even the members of a chain-gang can be guaranteed to speak to each other now and again. Work ought to occupy the literary imagination as much as sex, money, or power, and yet for the most part the Anglo-American novel has spent at least half of the first two or three centuries of its development resolutely denying its existence.

Could this absence on the page be attributed to the matter of unemployment (or perhaps incarceration?) being the ideal state for a writer. Long, uninterrupted spells and all that.

 It’s also tricky to find more general non-fiction descriptions and documentation about working life. Blogs where people moan about their jobs don’t offer detailed descriptions of the processes of fixing a telephone pole or deciding on blah blah levels in x-rays or deciding on how the council should signpost a roundabout …likely because people probably assume no one’s interested. Likely no one is interested except some quirky novelist zooming in for curious details to borrow.