In 1973, Elizabeth Hardwick declared that sex could no longer be the subject of great literature. The novel of seduction — in the vein of “The Scarlet Letter” and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” of Dreiser, Zola and Henry James — was dead. “You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value,” she wrote in a precise, imperiously beautiful essay, “Seduction and Betrayal.” Some 25 years later, Vivian Gornick asserted that the novel of love was now in uncertain health. We simply know too much to believe such stories with the old fervor, she argued in “The End of the Novel of Love.” The notion of romance as a vehicle for self-discovery asks us to disregard what we know to be true: This is work we must do for ourselves.

I’ve always been intrigued by, if wary of, these arguments, out of a streak of weird, warrantless optimism, at least where fiction is concerned. I share Arnold Schoenberg’s hope that “there is still much good music that can be written in C major.” But there’s no denying that the novel of love, of sex, has recessed. Friendship is ascendant, or parenthood or elegant alienation (see Rachel Cusk). Even in fiction that takes coupling as its subject, as in the novels of Sally Rooney, the characters seem a bit sheepish, as if caught participating in a nostalgic exercise.

The drama of the romance hasn’t totally withered away, however; it’s merely migrated. You’ll recognize all the familiar throes — exalted expectations and dashed hopes, disillusionment and embarrassing self-delusion — in fiction about work. Specifically, about late capitalism’s carousel of grinding, precarious labor; see the books of Helen DeWitt, Catherine Lacey, Ling Ma, Hiroko Oyamada and Sayaka Murata.

In “Temporary,” a brisk, wildly imaginative first novel by Hilary Leichter, the unnamed protagonist is a temp worker who trudges between 23 jobs. “I have a shorthand kind of career,” she tells us. “Short tasks, short stays, short skirts. My temp agency is an uptown pleasure dome of powder-scented women in sensible shoes. As is customary, I place my employment in their manicured hands. With trusty carpal alchemy they knead my résumé into a series of paychecks that constitute a life.”