When you hate your job, the flavors of alienation on offer are limitless. You could be frustrated by the work you’re doing, feel at odds with your co-workers, or feel exploited by management. Perhaps, like in some devious type of swirl, two or more of these combine to form something truly nauseating. That alienation can manifest in many forms: stress, headaches, irritability, body language, binge drinking—this list, too, is virtually endless.
Contemporary workplace issues can feel like the stuff of speculative and surreal fiction without much literary polish. From the erosion of work/life balance to employers using technology to surveil workers, the cautionary tales of George Saunders and Kurt Vonnegut are rapidly becoming quotidian. We’re not quite at a point when work has you so depressed you manifest a black hole—at least, hopefully not—or when your anxiety dreams become indistinguishable from your soul-crushing job (which is conducted in dreams), but who knows what the rest of the decade will bring?
Dreams as a literal job site can be found in Molly McGhee’s novel Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind; the image of a miniature black hole comes from Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe. They aren’t the only unconventional takes on working circa now to emerge recently. The narrator of Eskor David Johnson’s Pay As You Go seeks a low-stress job cutting hair (and an affordable apartment to go along with it), but his quest for both takes him across a sprawling, surreal American city. Michael Cisco’s Pest, meanwhile, follows the misadventures of an engineer whose apparent dream job curdles into something horrific—leaving him trapped in the body of a yak.
Each of these books is about economic precarity, in its own way—and the peculiar challenges that come with employment and its demands. “Abernathy can now spend his salary on rent, debt, or food,” McGhee writes relatively early in her novel. “Though he can’t have all three, he can choose any two he likes.” Cassie, the narrator of Ripe, is repeatedly intimidated by Sasha, a coworker who psychologically abuses her with the threat of losing her job—“I can always hire someone to handle it. Someone with more experience.” Pest protagonist Chalo is an engineer who leaps at the chance to take on a more design-oriented position. And Slide, the hero of Pay As You Go, is in search of a better place to live; that making more from his work is crucial to achieving that goal goes without saying.
And, as many of us have learned, that pursuit can involve bad decisions. In the case of Slide, his own quest for a better life finds him becoming increasingly entangled with a local crime boss after devastating floods remake the city of Polis, where the novel is set. In the case of Chalo, the opportunities provided by his new job prompt him to overlook several red flags from Grant, the man at the center of an ambitious architectural project—including to accompany him on a trip to a bank in search of a loan for the project. The sequence, which includes one bank employee warning Grant that “this is a no-paper establishment,” abounds with moments of wry comedy—but it’s also a sign that Chalo would be better off if he sprinted towards the closest exit. There’s also the fact that we know where this all ends, which is to say with Chalo in the body of a yak. (The novel plays out in several timeframes, and Cisco parallels Grant and Chalo’s work together with Chalo’s increasing awareness of his new body and the slow loss of his sense of himself as human.) And unless your life goal is to become a yak, it seems logical to say that any job that leaves your consciousness occupying the form of cattle is not a good one.
Surreal and speculative elements accentuate the workplace of Ripe as well, as well as other elements of Cassie’s life. “The black hole has been with me for as long as I can remember, a dark dot on the film of my life,” Etter writes of Cassie’s unlikely companion. Cassie also describes the yearning to fully comprehend this bizarre facet of her life, which feels like a terrifying reflection of everything that she’s repressed in order to conform to a thoroughly toxic workplace culture:
“But I keep trying to understand, to go beyond the metaphor. I read the articles, I keep up with the research, I wait for the day a discovery will make sense of the black hole living alongside me.”
In Ripe, Cassie is periodically told that she’s not performing well on metrics she didn’t think that she was being judged on. There’s an almost dreamlike quality to certain elements of the book: namely, that archetypal anxiety dream where everyone assumes you know precisely what you’re doing in a job, but you don’t. (See also: Christopher Durang’s play The Actor’s Nightmare, which turns this very anxiety into full-on dread.) Given that the title character of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind does his work in dreams, it’s not surprising that dream logic plays a role here as well—though with an added layer of stress in the mix. Consider this passage, as Jonathan and a colleague go about their work in one psyche:
“He and Kai are in one of those dreams where an adult is reliving their childhood humiliation. Kai does not immediately catapult Abernathy out as she vacuums up children blowing raspberries, though this has been her favorite mood lately: to eject him before he can say a word.”
Sudden shifts in dynamics, unexplained actions, and odd behavior: it’s not coincidental that the dreams that Jonathan visits (while he himself dreams) end up blurring the line between the anxieties of others and his own fears and apprehensions. That the very line of work Jonathan takes part in has a stated goal of making the dreamers better workers during the day adds another layer of critique to the proceedings. Alternately: it’s a novel about a guy whose nightmare job literally involves cleaning up other people’s nightmares, at least some of which were presumably generated by their nightmare jobs.
Still, it isn’t hard to see why Jonathan—or the characters from any of these novels—seek out work they’re skeptical about. “Once we switched to charging money my life’s coffers began refilling at last,” Pay As You Go’s Slide states at one point. But there’s also a moment in the novel where his candor about his situation, and the precarity thereof, rings true for nearly anyone, whether or not they live in a near-future city periodically devastated by extreme weather:
“Life had pulled a fast one on me and swapped out my dreams for lesser ones. I couldn’t believe I was back here again, bunkered in a shitty apartment and saving up just to be poor.”
Among the things that resonates deeply about Pay As You Go is the way its epic scale and the deeply relatable goals of its protagonist play off one another. It’s an epic tale about the type of character who isn’t usually at the center of an epic tale. And while this novel’s DNA goes to some interesting places—Johnson’s Acknowledgements includes a list of writers to whom “[t]his book owes a spiritual debt,” including Renata Adler, Ralph Ellison, and Gabriel García Márquez—there’s also something archetypal about Slide’s ongoing quest.
Workplaces can be communities as well, and much of the tension of Pest emerges from the unexpected interactions among Chalo, Grant, and AC, a woman hired to translate a series of occult documents from Tibetan. Further complicating matters is the fact that AC encounters difficulty doing her work. And so her next step, as Cisco writes, involves literally faking it: “So next day she sits down and just makes up a bunch of plausible-sounding stuff. He won’t know the difference.”
There’s a bleak and absurd sense of comedy that runs throughout Pest; like other works in Cisco’s bibliography (especially the mammoth novel Animal Money), there’s a focus on the arbitrary nature of economic systems and the ways we describe them. The way that workplace interactions, surreal forays into the occult, and deadpan absurdism converge here can feel unexpected, but it’s not without its logic. The indignities and frustrations of working for a living can be deeply strange when you think about them; why not opt for full detachment and turn the alienation into something closer to cosmic horror?
Just as there is no one universal experience of working a job, so too is there not anything like one universal approach to the workplace novel. These four novels help to illustrate some of the ways that this subset of contemporary fiction is poised for transformation—and illustrates some of the ways that speculative elements can make the surreal that much more grounded.
And as the nature of work becomes more speculative itself, it’s not difficult to see why speculative-tinged takes on workplace novels are gaining ground. Decades ago, working with machine learning systems (or “AI”) or an entirely virtual workplace were the stuff of science fiction; now, they’re thoroughly quotidian. The uncertainty of countless aspects of work—from the role automation plays in it to the literal environment where one’s job is carried out—has also opened the door to the surreal, the imaginative, and the science fictional. Who knows where the next level of workplace anxieties might take readers and writers alike?
