Literature

Kieran Goddard recommends books on how labor shapes, reshapes, and ultimately misshapes our inner emotional world.

A scathing satire on the hyperrationality of capitalism’s means and the ways in which they simultaneously occlude and justify any number of violent ends. Marly is a simple soul, he likes women and money, but after learning the art of double-entry bookkeeping (a two-sided method in which every entry requires a corresponding opposite entry to a different account), he decides to apply the methodology to his own life. This early novel of Cusk’s is a perfect satire of the ways people aim to change themselves simply by changing their profession. [Preparation for the Next Life](https://bookshop.org/a/269/9780991360826), The War For Gloria is a fierce reckoning with masculinity and loss. It is in the moments where Ogle blurs the boundaries between caring as a professional duty, regulated and remunerated, and caring as an impulsive human instinct that we see how truly promising a writer he is. O’Nan is particularly skilled at capturing the heaviness and monotony of service work, how often workers are treated poorly by both the corporate overlords they never see and the nightmare customers that they very much do. The novel uses a fragmented system of dual narration to explore both the deadening rhythms of contemporary office life and the tumbling, occluded recollections surrounding a sexual assault. [Hourglass](https://bookshop.org/a/269/9781609458171), although primarily a love story, tries to touch on contemporary labor in a way that acknowledges its continued centrality to the lives of most people. These are eight of the best: [The War for Gloria](https://bookshop.org/a/269/9781524732325) by Atticus Lish [Bad Girls](https://bookshop.org/a/269/9781635422023) by Camila Villada, translated by Kit Maude There is something dream-like in how we learn about Martin’s journey from fashionable flaneur to middle-aged office worker, trapped in a hamster wheel of commuting and solo dining in soulless restaurants. Lazily described by many reviewers as “experimental,” this does a disservice to the emotional clarity and intellectual directness of Watson’s debut.