Like many bookish people, I love reading fiction about the bookish life—novels about writers, about bookstores, about publishing. If you haven’t read Olivia Goldsmith’s The Bestseller (1996), please do; Kirkus’ review called it “a meaty send-up of publishing told with intelligence, wit, and shameless enthusiasm,” and I heartily agree. But sometimes you want to read about jobs that don’t involve the word stet, and it’s surprising how rare they are.
Bonnie Garmus’ debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday, April 5), is set in a laboratory and a television studio in the 1950s and early ’60s, but even more than the specifics of chemistry and broadcasting, the book lays bare the mechanics of bad jobs everywhere, particularly for women; the protagonist, Elizabeth Zott, has to deal with “a writhing pile of sexists, liars, rapists, dopes, and arrogant assholes,” as our review said. She’s a brilliant chemist whose boss steals her work, and when she starts a new job hosting a TV cooking program, she has another boss who keeps trying to get her to dumb it down. She meets her match in Calvin Evans, a Nobel Prize–nominated chemist, when she strides into his lab to commandeer a box of beakers she needs because she can’t procure them through the usual channels. Elizabeth sees the world in terms of chemistry, approaching everything from talking to her dog to cooking dinner like an experiment, and it’s a triumph of the book that Garmus not only illuminates the details of Elizabeth’s jobs, but shows the way a scientist’s brain works.
Everyone wants to have a best friend at work, but you wouldn’t necessarily want your actual job to be as the work wife of a temperamental Hollywood producer. That’s the position Zanne Klein finds herself in in Alison B. Hart’s debut novel, The Work Wife (Graydon House, July 19). As our review said, “This book flies on a magic carpet of seamless, intricate detail, much of it from work experience the author acknowledges in an afterword. Whether we’re dropping in on [the director’s actual wife] with her glam squad or watching in wonder as headset-wearing assistants track the movements of their bosses like world leaders, there’s never a moment's slip in authenticity or momentum.”
Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Complicities (Algonquin, Sept. 20) introduces Suzanne, a middle-aged Boston woman whose husband is in jail, a minor-league Bernie Madoff, as she tries to figure out how to live the rest of her life. Perhaps surprisingly, her answer is to move to a working-class Cape Cod town and teach herself to be a massage therapist. When she finishes work on her first client, Suzanne is exhilarated: “For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had never felt so competent.” Soon, a whale has beached not far from her rented house, and Suzanne joins the volunteer effort to try to keep it alive, another kind of physical labor.
In Sinking Bell (Graywolf, Sept. 27), a debut collection of short stories set around Flagstaff, Arizona, Bojan Louis “writes of electricians and day laborers, custodians and aspiring writers, many of them Navajo, their lives constrained by poor pay and bad bosses, parole agreements and addiction, cultural expectations and racism,” according to our review. “The unrelenting grind of work, sometimes absent from fiction, takes center stage here, as Louis’ characters dig holes, fix engines, mop hallways, plaster walls, and taxi people around. Though the circumstances are often exploitative, this labor is also so closely described that Louis imbues it with beauty and worth—bestowing dignity on his characters.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
