Why Isn’t Work A Central Element in Today’s Fiction?

February 1, 2010

John Lanchester asks the question and tries to answer it. It’s a fascinating article and a question I’ve wondered about, too, since we all (well, almost all) work–even most writers have a job outside of writing. Here’s  Lanchester on how work used to be central to fiction:

Insofar as it does, most of the great books that describe work were written in the 19th century: Zola’s novels, or Dickens’s, or Moby-Dick (which among other things is a great novel about the job of whaling).

Tolstoy was interested in work, especially in Anna Karenina, where everyone remembers Levin sweating in the field with his peasants, but where there is also one of the crispest depictions of civil service life, in the character of Oblonsky. It is his extramarital activities that inspire the famous opening of the novel — “every happy family is alike” — but he has also won great respect as a bureaucrat. Tolstoy writes that he did so chiefly because of “his complete indifference to the business he was engaged on, in consequence of which he was never carried away by enthusiasm and never made mistakes”. Dickens’s characters work, and so do Thackeray’s and Trollope’s and Mark Twain’s and Flaubert’s (which is striking, since Flaubert never in his life did a day’s paid work).

The modern world of work, however, is much less well-represented in fiction; startlingly so, given how many people define themselves through work and how central work is to so many people’s self-description. In modern literary fiction, in particular, a job tends to be as much a marginal detail of a character’s life as her hair colour.

Read the whole thing here. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)