It's interesting, I'm in the middle of Then We Came to the End, and the lack of plot hasn't bothered me (or rather, the smallness of the plot--I think I figured out which of the little threads of anecdote were supposed to drive the story). But when Mike asked, "What's going on your book?" about 100 pages in, I had to think for about 10 seconds and say, "Nothing."
But what has sort of gotten to me is the idea of looking at people in an office environment as drones who THINK they're interesting and unique people. I guess there's this corporate stereotype that everyone is a faceless drone. But then when you're in the trenches, you see past the stereotype to the fact that each of you is a real person with a full life, a special and unique snowflake. But then by stepping back another step and seeing each of those separate lives as meaningless and swallowed up by the droning corporate world, without much of an internal life and with NO non-pathetic internal life, it just feels like it's unnecessarily reducing people. It's a book about quiet desperation that you don't even know is desperate. It's a friendly condescension, someone who's clearly looking at his own life that way, but since this guy wrote a book and presumably doesn't work in a cube farm anymore, or has proven himself to be non-pathetically extracurricular, well, he's exempt.
And the thing about it is, we look at people who work other jobs, now or historically, and there isn't this sense of drone-ness, of condescension, as though they'd given up basic humanity and weren't they foolish for it? You don't look at industrial workers who work a machine in a factory all day and turn up your nose at their lack of an internal life. You don't look at a farmer on his tractor getting heatstroke and skin cancer in the sun all day, pulling muscles and putting his back out without medical insurance and smile sadly at how hard he has to labor for so little payback (though, as an aside, I can say firmly that a farmer on his tractor has a rich, fertile internal life). Is it because they're less than us white-collars, and couldn't be expected to understand our wasted talent? Is it because of the inherent dignity of working with your hands? Is it because they are presumed to have only that job standing between them and starvation, while we, the white-collars, would have that factory job (or, more likely, a gig as a barista at Starbucks, or that book we always meant to write) to fall back on?
Oh, who knows? I'm overreacting, thinking not only about this book, but about articles I've read and just a vibe I perceive in the world. Think about The Office, and Jim's slow transformation into Michael Scott. Think about all the times you've wanted to give it all up to weave baskets to sell at Renaissance Faires, or to write music reviews for the Phoenix in your garret.
And I don't mean this as a condemnation, because the book is quite good. It captures the balance between work and interaction, the weird intimacy and yet anonymity of an office life, the boss you all respect and love and fear (hairy eyeball, anyone?), the scramble to look busy and the intense draw of gossip and distraction and cleverness. Their office has more outrageous characters than mine ever did, and more frantic energy, but it's also a dot com office, which accounts for a lot of the difference--I remember, even in my stable, never-at-risk job, the sense of more-more-more coming to a complete end, and the bewildered, lost feeling that goes along with it.
I'm no longer in the office, and before too long, I'll be joining the service sector. But I'll still have coworkers, and I'll still spend a lot of time fretting about budgets and doing what someone else tells me, and cleaning up crap (God, I hope just figuratively). I don't think any of us are going somewhere where our lives won't have those factors in them, except those special few novelists among us. I wish them good luck, but I hope they don't forget us white collars on their climb to the top.
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