In search of novels about working life

Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End (Viking Penguin) and Jenny Turner's The Brainstorm (Cape), first novels from either side of the Atlantic, share an unusual distinction. Not only are they both set in an office - Ferris's cast work for a Chicago advertising agency, Turner's labour on the "brainy" section of a Docklands-based Sunday newspaper - each takes a sustained interest in the idea of the working environment and its potential to alter the behaviour of the people caught up in it. The effect is oddly disconcerting, reminding us that for all the confidence we repose in fiction as a measure of our times, vast acres of human experience take place more or less beyond its boundaries.

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.

There are several reasons for this unwillingness to admit that the greater part of most waking lives is taken up by the routine obligation to earn a living. The most obvious has to do with social class. The Victorian novelist might not have been born a gentleman, but he invariably had gentlemanly aspirations: the idea that someone might support his family by selling Manchester goods over a draper's counter would have seemed vaguely disgraceful. He approved of work's material rewards, and the enhanced social status that proficiency at work allowed, but the vital topic of how a man's salary was earned scarcely interested him at all. Dickens's Mr Dombey is represented as a titan of the export market and all-round capitalist prince, but what exactly are the goods in which he deals? Dickens never says.

Nineteenth-century novels are awash with lawyers, engineers, medical men and parliamentarians whose whole professional life exists off the page. The only contemporary trade in which Trollope can be got to take a sustained interest is his own professional calling at the Post Office: hence the almost neurotic concern, in the six novels of the Barsetshire Chronicles (1855-1867) as to how letters from one character to another make their way around the country.

Towards the end of the Victorian age, a faint democratising element began to declare itself. Jude Fawley in Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) is a stone-mason, a trade with which Hardy, professionally trained as an architect, had a nodding familiarity. George Moore's Esther Waters (1894) is one of the first English novels to show country house life from the angle of the servants drudging to sustain it.

But the real interest in work as a subject worth exploring on its own terms nearly always comes from America. Jack London's short story "The Apostate", for example, is a pioneering attempt to examine the psychological effects of repetitive, long-term manual labour. Johnny, its half-starved hero, is a teenage factory operative who has worked since early childhood to support his mother and his younger siblings. Eventually he falls ill: such is his reputation for hard work, though, that an admiring foreman promises to keep the job open for him. Then, on the day he is expected back at his loom, he refuses to get out of bed. His justification, as he tells his sorrowing mother, is that "I've ben movin' ever since I was born."

Johnny's pained absorption in the practical processes of work is something new in fiction, but its trail can be followed all over the shelf-full of books written to commemorate the start of the American "machine age". There is no contemporary English version of, say, Theodore Dreiser's The Titan (1914), in which the fortune racked up by its financier hero Frank Cowperwood is calculated almost from one stock exchange transaction to the next, and hardly anything in the same category as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), an exposéof the Chicago meat-packing plants: the nearest equivalent would be a novel like Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914) which records, in punitive detail, the exploitation of a gang of down-trodden Edwardian house-painters.

Tressell was unlike most early 20th- century chroniclers of British proletarian life in having worked in the decorating trade himself. Americans, alternatively, tended to have first-hand experience of the kind of low-grade callings introduced into their work and to be seriously interested in putting these kinds of employment to fictional use. Clyde Griffiths, the doomed anti-hero of Dreiser's masterpiece An American Tragedy (1925), is seen variously as a soda-jerk, a hotel bell-hop and departmental manager in his rich uncle's collar-making concern. Like Tressell's ground-down cast, Studs Lonigan in James T Farrell's Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1932-5) works as a painter and decorator. Work, or rather its absence, finally does for Studs: he dies of pneumonia, contracted after a day's fruitless job-hunting in Depression-era Chicago.

Studs's grim demise gestures at one of the paradoxes of English fiction from the same period: the novels that purport to be about work and working people are generally about work's absence, the search for it and the disabling psychological consequences of its being withheld. What became known as the "working-class novel" was well afloat as a genre by the 1930s, but its most characteristic products - novels such as Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole (1933) or Harry Heslop's Last Cage Down (1935) - are actually about unemployment. At the same time, the almost self-conscious mundanity of much British fiction of the 1930s, a deliberate attempt to get away from the "party" novel that had dominated the previous decade, found novelists examining career choices that would rarely have been entertained by their predecessors of half a century before.

Gordon Comstock, the put-upon poetry-writing hero of Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), works, as Orwell had done, in a Hampstead bookshop. Bob, Jenny and Ella, the three central characters of Patrick Hamilton's London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1929-1935) are, respectively, a pub waiter, a prostitute and a bar-maid. Alongside them rose a tide of novels about business and the professions, in which, following the Victorian template, interest in the comic or tragic possibilities offered up by the activity involved is balanced by an almost complete separation from the work itself. Not the only Dickensian characteristic of J B Priestley's Angel Pavement (1930), in which sinister Mr Golspie systemati- cally defrauds the firm of Twigg & Dersingham, is Priestley's conspicuous lack of interest in the veneers and inlays in which the company deals.

This tradition persists deep into the post-war landscape: stacks of novels about the burgeoning national bureaucracy, whether practised by the war-time intelligence services (Anthony Powell's The Military Philosophers, 1969) or in C P Snow's Corridors of Power, but very little about the implications of that bureaucracy for the people behind the desk.

William Cooper's The Struggles of Albert Woods (1952) is a typical example of the "New Man" novel of the 1950s, in which professional life is beginning to be colonised by upwardly mobile grammar school boys whose lowly social origins would previously have denied them this preferment. But for Cooper's hero, the world of "affairs" is merely a sophisticated game in which the only real motive is personal advancement. The same displacement can be seen further down the scale in the post-war vogue for gritty realism from the working-class Midlands and the North. Work, to Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) has no intrinsic validity or interest: it is merely there to provide the funding for a social life that will mask the pointlessness of the nine to five.

As Sillitoe's rare accounts of Arthur at large in the bicycle factory demonstrate, the difficulties of examining the idea of "work" in fiction are not all down to literary snobbery: the novelist's real problem is how to dramatise boredom. During a 13-year stake-out in the City, I used to comfort myself with the thought that just possibly some of the experience gained might be of professional use. I was wrong. In fact, 10 years spent drudging in the marketing department of an accountancy firm inspired in me no thoughts whatsoever, other than a retrospective horror, and certainly none of the material necessary for a realistic novel about office life. Interestingly, both Ferris and Turner, though keen on authentic office detail - the gangings-up, the practised deceptions (Turner describes a character who "sat at the desk like a mogul. He played the part very well") - go beyond realism to create a kind of alternative community, a queer little exaggerated world with its own rituals and private codes. Then We Came to the End emphasises this neurotic collectivism by being written in the first person plural. Only in the final chapter, after a riot of hirings, firings, aimings and blamings, does the veil rise to reveal "just the two of us, you and me".

Naturally enough, writers tend to set their fiction in the professional environments with which they themselves are familiar. Post-war British fiction, consequently, is rife with books set in branches of the media, in advertising agencies, universities, newspaper offices and publishing firms. On the other hand, writers are natural solitaries. Whatever experience they may have gained of "office life" is usually deeply disillusioning. The Brainstorm, for instance, is suffused with a kind of horror at the thought of the moral and intellectual compromises forced on its cast, proficiency reduced to an ability to devise a filing system, expertise hopelessly adrift.

A novel such as Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine (1988) in which the environment is seen as something more than a charnel house enclosing a band of resentful drones, is a comparative rarity. As for the really important modern developments in "work" - globalisation, the rise of the international money markets, the creation of a virtual economic world fundamentally detached from the processes of ordinary life - the number of contemporary writers capable of understanding their complexity, much less rendering them into fictional form, is painfully limited. Significantly, Joshua Ferris is interested in the pace and rhythms of work, the idea of an office as a kind of sluggish and rather desultory machine, subtly manipulating the human lives within its walls: there is no wider economic context.

One of the great merits of Justin Cartwright's Look at it This Way (1990), set mostly in the City of London at the time of the Lawson boom, is that Cartwright has done his homework, can see both the serio-comic potential of life on an options desk and the likely effects on the individuals caught up in the high-grade Monopoly game that was late-20th-century capital exchange.

If I try very hard I can just about imagine a 21st- century Dreiser: someone able to write about the financial basis of the modern world at a level beyond the reportage of the average Wall Street thriller. That this panoptic intelligence shows no sign of arriving is, perhaps, only another mark of the fatal detachment of the modern "literary" writer from the society that he or she presumes to reflect.

A longer version of this essay appears in the 'Time Out' guide to '1,000 Books to Change Your Life', ed Jonathan Derbyshire, published by Ebury in June