Read all of these
books while you're supposed to be working.
The Diagnosis
by Alan Lightman (Pantheon, 369 pages, $25)
The Business
by Iain Banks (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $25)
Labor Day
by Floyd Kemske (Catbird Press, 203 pages, $22)
Day Job:
A Workplace Reader for the Restless Age by Jonathan
Baird (St. Martin's Griffin, 149 pages, $17.95)
Working for the Man will fuck you up. It doesn't matter
if your corporate job brings you power, wealth and fame;
you will still be reduced to a soulless husk welded to a
keyboard and cell phone. In our warped society, work is
a four-letter word, yet workaholism is rampant. Not surprisingly,
this confused, insidious addiction to corporate materialism
serves as subject for a flurry of recent novels.
In The Diagnosis, Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams,
Good Benito) evokes Kafka when his protagonist, Bill
Chalmers, suffers a strange episode on his way to work.
The day begins like any other, with a flock of self-absorbed
businesspeople waiting for the train, Palm Pilots and phones
buzzing. But once he's on the train, Chalmers suddenly loses
himself, literally. He forgets his name and his destination.
His briefcase is missing. In his terror, he strips to nothing,
and the police find him lying fetal on the floor of the
train. After some bizarre wanderings, Chalmers finally remembers
who he is and returns to his suburban home. He tosses the
incident off as a mugging--someone must have bonked him
on the head--but his life has changed forever.
Chalmers begins to deteriorate physically. His hands turn
numb, then his feet; he sits at his computer, flailing at
his keyboard like a 2-year-old. His coworkers are sympathetic
to his face but scheme behind his back. His doctors are
baffled but won't admit it. His wife is horrified that her
husband is becoming ineffectual, and she retreats into alcohol
and an online romance with a stranger. Most heartbreaking
is the reaction of Chalmers' adolescent son, Alex, whose
self-assurance slowly crumbles as his father's illness escalates.
Like any professor worth his sheepskin, Lightman--a humanities
professor at MIT--nimbly throws some Socratic shit into
the mix, creating a hands-down-brilliant parallel between
the ancient Greeks and modern life. The author also has
a flair for hilarious, sensual moments that are perfectly
formed, such as a scene in which Chalmers inhales an entire
sandwich at his desk in about two bites. In all, The
Diagnosis deserves its nomination for a National Book
Award this year.
If Lightman's novel seems lofty, British author Iain Banks'
The Business goes hurtling over the top. Kathryn
Telman, a senior executive officer in a far-reaching megacorporation,
is attempting to take a sabbatical. But on the first page
she is awakened by a call from a colleague; he was shanghaied
on his way to an international meeting, then woke to find
half of his teeth extracted (see! It fucks you up!). She
advises him to attend the meeting anyway. Telman is then
called back into action when The Business requires her to
negotiate yet another takeover, but this time it's of an
entire Third World country.
It's refreshing to see a woman protagonist in a corporate
culture satire, especially one as ballsy and crafty as Telman.
Sadly, she is wasted on a weak plot that gets downright
goofy in parts. Banks has a huge cult following from his
science-fiction novels (Feersum, Endjinn,
etc.) and a solid reputation as a mainstream author (Complicity,
The Wasp Factory, etc). But he is sleeping on the
job with The Business. Though he has all the elements
of a modern-day corporate satire--takeover shenanigans,
Internet oddities, managerial thugs--he fails to bring it
together into a value added package.
These books have some interesting parallels. In each, the
corporation's business is vague, nearly impossible to define:
One company moves information, the other acquires stuff.
Both protagonists view their superiors as maneuvering morons.
Both have invested their entire being into their jobs, and
both are in danger of being destroyed by their company.
The Diagnosis and The Business warn that dedication
to corporate life will--you guessed it--fuck you up!
For additional information about the power of corporations
to destroy perfectly good lives, read Day Job: A Workplace
Reader for the Restless Age by Jonathan Baird (Tin
House's designer). This experiment in design and text
is a jobsuck genre minor classic, now available in paperback.
Here, a corporate customer-service rep chronicles a day
in his angsty life through sticky notes, memos and advice
gleaned from self-help gurus.
A more conventional novel, Labor Day, is the fourth
installment of Floyd Kemske's "corporate nightmare" series,
a dark comedy about the men who manipulate a corporate union
war. Kemske personalizes a labor struggle that, although
it will affect scads of workers, boils down to just two
guys.
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