QUILLBLOG

Keep on working (and writing)

The publication of a couple of office-set novels, Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and Jenny Turner’s The Brainstorm, has writer DJ Taylor wondering (in The Independent) why there aren’t more novels about working life. “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,” Taylor writes. There are a few reasons, he suggests, from Victorian class snobbery to the struggle of making boredom interesting to the limited real-world work experience of many writers (who are “natural solitaries”). All of which adds up, Taylor concludes, to “another mark of the fatal detachment of the modern ‘literary’ writer from the society that he or she presumes to reflect.” A grim but convincing indictment.

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