Dipping into refreshing watercooler lit
The Room and Then We Came to the End: Book Reviews
There really should be a literary category for fiction about the shenanigans, shitstorms and surrealism of the modern office environment. Call it offidystopian fiction.
Kafka was a master at portraying the darkly comic side of bureaucracies, which can be a perniciously peculiar place in which to make a living. Office workplace fiction seems to have blossomed recently in the works of authors like David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, and in popular culture. Hell, they’ve even made a gif out of it.
(Unfortunately, the office novel is still a category dominated by male writers. But that’s a matter for other commentators to tackle in places like the New Yorker.)
A few years ago, I guffawed my way through Joshua Ferris’s excellent debut novel Then We Came to the End. It is the story set in a Chicago ad agency and the types of office goings-on he portrays — gossip, politics, backstabbing, job cuts and the fear of job cuts, inept management and coffee breaks — had me nodding my head in familiarity. That is, when I wasn’t blurting out big laughter bubbles at the insanity and inanities of his fictional world. (Those working in the advertising world can immediately recognize what comic Dave Barry calls the “client from hell” and this book’s characters efforts at “polishing the turd” — the hopeless job that said client turned into shit but still wants made into a diamond.)
Here’s what the protagonist of this cleverly constructed, first-person plural narrative has to say about that world:
We were corporate citizens, buttressed by advanced degrees and padded by corporate fat. We were above the fickle market forces of overproduction and mismanaged inventory.
It’s a different kind of world, advertising. Wallace says its job is to “create an anxiety relievable by purchase.” Here’s how the protagonist of Ferris’s novel sums up his role, and that of his colleagues, in his “cubicle culture” other-world:
A good deal of our self-esteem was predicated on the belief that we were good marketers, that we understood what made the world tick — that in fact, we told the world how to tick. We got it, we got it better than others, we got it so well we could teach it to them. Using a wide variety of media, we could demonstrate for our fellow Americans their anxieties, desires, insufficiencies, and frustrations — and how to assuage them all. We informed you in six seconds that you needed something you didn’t know you lacked. We made you want anything that anyone willing to pay us wanted you to want. We were hired guns of the human soul. We pulled the strings on the people across the land and by god they got to their feet and they danced for us.
Using Ralph Waldo Emerson as his moral touchstone, Ferris goes on to show how this legal Ponzi-world cannot be sustained. Certainly, not if you’re a worker who wants to keep his soul — nevermind his job.
As he echoes The Great Gatsby’s “boats against the tide” in his conclusion, Ferris nevertheless notes there is still hope for America. Citing one character’s comment that “this country (is) the best republic that ever began to fade,” Then We Came to the End ends with:
We kept hanging on, waiting for them to send over the big guy who’d force us out with a final command. And we would leave, eventually. Out to the parking lot, a few parting words. ‘Sure was good to see you again,’ we’d say. And with that, we’d get in our cars and open the windows and drive off, tapping the horn a final time. But for the moment, it was nice just to sit there together. We were the only two left. Just the two of us, you and me.
The Room, by Swedish author Jonas Karlsson, is a very different kind of work in the genre of watercooler lit. This strange tale about Björn, a delightful character who discovers a secret room in his staid, bureaucratic office, is written in the tradition of Kafka and also qualifies as offidystopian.
Having worked in an office environment for many years, The Room struck a loud chord within me. In particular, I could relate to the open-office environment that Björn finds himself in.
This form of working world is an abomination and a late 20th century vestige of ill-thought-out office planning. (For those who would disagree, just ask yourself who is in favour of this hellish concept. It’s usually the managers who occupy offices — the more important and elevated in status and pay scale, the more likely they are to have windows too. The ‘worker ants,’ as a dear friend and co-worker used to call us, describe work in this environment in less-glowing terms. We’re like egg-laying hens, all lined up in a row, or fish in a bowl in full view of our masters. We’re trapped inside a spaciously “inspired” environment of “luxury minimalism” that has been accurately described as the “nowhere office,” one designed to erase any trace of a worker once we’re gone.)
Björn’s erratic and bizarre behaviour may remind you of office workers you’ve known. But that’s the thing about fictionalized office spaces: those of us who work in these places see ourselves in the characters, and we see our co-workers as well. I’ve found myself nodding in familiar agreement often at episodes of “The Office” and whenever I watch Office Space.
Here’s Björn’s view of his office, and room:
Inhibited people don’t see the world the way it really is. They only see what they themselves want to see. They don’t see the nuances. The little differences.
A lot of people, more than you’d imagine, think everything’s fine. They’re happy with things the way they are. They don’t see the faults because they’re too lazy to allow themselves to have their everyday routines disturbed. They think that as long as they do their best, everything will work out okay.
You have to remind them. You have to show people like that what their shortcomings are.
So observes Björn at the beginning of chapter eight, one of 63 short segments in this brief novel about an “open plan office with no screens.” That theme of appearances versus reality is woven through the novel. “It’s easy to be taken in by new acquaintances,” Björn comments later in the book. Later still, he describes passing by the door of his ‘room’ “as if it didn’t exist.”
Confounded that his co-workers have not been able to see what‘s plain to him — a room in the middle of this big open office —Björn wonders if this was how Copernicus felt, presumably upon his discovery that the sun was the centre of the universe instead of the earth. Björn’s co-workers, however, band together and try to cast out the rebel from their cozy open confines.
The philosophical dilemma of whether there’s a room there or not is finally resolved, quite humorously, in these words from Björn to his co-workers:
I could work on the assumption that I myself am wrong and the rest of you right, but that doesn’t make much sense in my head. I simply have to assume that one of us is lying. Because I know that I am telling the truth, I draw the conclusion that the rest of you are telling untruths. That’s simply the logical conclusion.
Tell that to the boss and let him know where he can shove it.
Claudio D’Andrea, who’s been writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications for 30 years, wishes he had his own room at his day job — or noise-cancelling headphones. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
