It’s tempting to see all this as nostalgia for the time when most people worked with their hands and a whaling ship or a military ambulance or a migrant workers’ camp could be an aspiring novelist’s Harvard and Yale. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American writers weren’t afraid to talk shop, whether the work in question was making money, as in William Dean Howells’s tales of young Gilded Age strivers, or making sausage, as in Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle.”

In the 1930s, as the Depression deepened, work became a particularly urgent subject for novelists, precisely because so many people didn’t have any. In John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” work, any kind of work, was a fragile bulwark against starvation. In the so-called proletarian novels of the period, with their evil bosses, downtrodden workers and heroic organizers, labor acquired a kind of romance — not because the actual tasks were ennobling, but because unions held the key to broader social redemption, generally along doctrinaire socialist lines. (Which didn’t necessarily imply aesthetic progress: the proletarian novel, the journalist Murray Kempton later wrote, was “rooted in the American tradition of bad literature.”) In his “U.S.A.” trilogy, John Dos Passos, like many literary men and women from privileged backgrounds, connected with the rising misery around him by describing the lives of the working, or workless, class. Other politically minded novelists, of authentically modest origins, made fiction the means for documenting the lives they had only barely escaped. As Morris Dickstein writes in “Dancing in the Dark,” his recent cultural history of the 1930s, the roughneck hero of James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” a house painter turned small-time thug, is “what the author himself might have become had he not left home and become a writer.”

Image Credit... Illustration by Paul Rogers

With the arrival of postwar prosperity, the literature of working-class struggle gave way to the literature of middle-­class disillusion. In novels like Sloan Wilson’s “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road,” work isn’t a tool of social redemption but a graveyard of individual dreams — often, as in the case of Yates’s Frank Wheeler, the dream of being an artist. It’s a theme the literary novel hasn’t been able to shake. Blue-collar misery has continued to inspire powerful fiction, whether Raymond Carver’s stories about laconically depressed waitresses and mechanics or Russell Banks’s portraits of violently self-destructive millworkers and snowplow drivers. But these days, it seems, the really unhappy people are working in offices.

Take, for example, the characters in Joshua Ferris’s dark satire “Then We Came to the End” (2007), set in a Chicago advertising agency caught in the throes of layoffs and water-cooler paranoia, and Ed Park’s “Personal Days” (2008), which unfolds in a similarly depopulating Manhattan cubicle farm. In reality, these satires of late-capitalist office life have less to say about actual work than about the bureaucratic rituals and distractions surrounding it: the joke PowerPoint presentations, the endless forwarding of stupid YouTube videos, the proliferation of Orwellian corporate jargon. In this vision, a job may provide a kind of grim life-boat camaraderie, along with a paycheck, but the work itself is meaningless unto mendacious: a metaphor for the lies and illusions that underlie our economy, if not our civilization. In Ferris’s novel, the agency’s big last-minute assignment — to create a humorous campaign for a shadowy breast-cancer awareness group — is itself a joke. In Park’s novel, the company’s actual business isn’t worth specifying at all.