Quality time at work with literary heroes, heroines

Labor Days

An Anthology of Fiction About Work

Selected by David Gates

Random House: 222 pp., $13.95 paper

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Considering how much time people spend at work, it’s remarkable how little time most writers spend describing whatever it is their characters do for a living. There may be good reasons for this, as David Gates, editor of the anthology “Labor Days,” observes in his introduction: The intimate dramas of most characters’ lives -- romantic, sexual and familial -- tend to occur outside the workplace. But, as Gates points out, the workplace is a setting with the potential to function as “the everyday equivalent of Homer’s battlefield and Shakespeare’s court ... [a place] where power can be won and lost, used and abused, where character can be tested.”

“Labor Days” offers fiction from the pens of 21 authors dealing with a wide variety of work experiences and written in an even wider range of styles. Five of the selections are short stories, including Raymond Carver’s delightful “Fat,” about a waitress and her outsize customer, and John Cheever’s memorable tale of an elevator operator, “Clancy in the Tower of Babel.”

The remaining 16 pieces are excerpts from novels, a motley assortment that gives us the genteel heroine of Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth” trying her hand at the millinery trade and the narrator of William Burroughs’ “Junky” learning how to roll a drunk on the subway.

Other writers also present disheartening pictures of work: the excerpt from Lynne Tillman’s “No Lease on Life” depicts the windowless, paranoia-inducing room where her heroine works as a proofreader; George Saunders’ dystopian “Pastoralia” invites us to imagine the plight of a man hired to impersonate a cave-dweller in a theme park.

For sheer brilliance and dramatic power, few of the selections match the scene that unfolds in the bowels of the paint factory in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Then there’s Philip Roth’s marvelous portrait of glove-making in “American Pastoral.” It’s also a pleasure to savor Richard Ford’s “Independence Day” account of the frustrations endured by his hero Frank Bascombe trying to sell real estate.

Gates has cast his net wide, giving us writers as dissimilar as Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, B.F. Skinner, Denis Johnson and Bruce Jay Friedman. But not all the selections are equally compelling. Some, like the brief excerpts from DeLillo’s “Libra” and Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” are thin; others, like the long passage from Stein’s “Three Lives,” are not especially interesting. As for Burroughs, it’s debatable whether rolling a drunk constitutes work.

It’s also debatable whether Gates has made the most of his opportunity. As he notes, his decision to limit his choices to work written after 1900 prevented him from including “the ur-text about office life,” Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” By excluding the 19th century, he has also excluded a wealth of material about the factories, farms and offices of that era by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Emile Zola and many more.

Yet even within the 20th century, there are missed opportunities. It is disappointing to encounter nothing by the great social realist Theodore Dreiser. Nor will readers find here the wonderful descriptions in D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers” of work in a coal mine and a prosthesis shop. One can’t help feeling the collection might have been enhanced by John Steinbeck’s Okies, the doctors of A.J. Cronin’s “The Citadel” and Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt.”

Still, there’s enough good writing in this collection to make it worthwhile, and many of the pieces call attention to what seems to be a sad fact of life these days: the huge disparity between the work many people would like to do and the jobs they actually have. “Labor Days” invites us to consider the relationship between jobs and human beings. As a character in “Invisible Man” pithily puts it: “They got all this machinery, but that ain’t everything; we the machines inside the machine.”