Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, wonders why so few contemporary novelists deal with the substance of work:
[I]f there is a politics of the white-collar novel in the United States, it is this: office fiction is deliberately and narrowly construed as being about manners, sociability, gossip, the micro-struggles for rank and status – in other words, “office politics” – rather than about the work that is done in offices. There are major exceptions to this rule:
the genre of the police procedural and the legal or medical thriller often make naturalistic drama out of the details of professional methods. So, too, do recent novels about finance. But well into the current era of the office novel – with books like Ed Park’s Personal Days (2008) and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) – novelists place a premium on satirizing how shockingly little employees manage to get done in a day. At the center of their novels is the sheer emptiness of work—the fact not only that little gets done, but that one only remembers little about the little that does get done. …
The late David Foster Wallace blazed a lonely and unfinished path with The Pale King, with its sublime portrait of the tedious labor of IRS employees. Wallace seemed to want to redeem a publicly maligned bureaucracy, in much the way that the sheer bulk of his heavily worn research testified to the unexampled heroism of the writer, who could make literature out of boring materials. If a new politics and a new novel of work still remains to be found, it might be found here: in the still submerged mass of what we do and how we feel about it.
The Dish 