Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road--The First Great Novel About Bullshit Jobs?

Time and again I have been struck by the absence of fiction in any medium--print literature, film, television, anything--which even makes a serious attempt to depict work. People have jobs, we hear about them incessantly, but where what they do is concerned, we either get glamorized, sensationalized nonsense (as with the cops, lawyers and doctors that a visitor from another planet might think are ninety-five percent of the work force), or nothing at all.

Some respond by saying that the reality of work is simply not entertaining. We get legal dramas where lawyers' work seems to consist entirely of dramatic courtroom speeches and confrontations in high-profile murder cases because what lawyers really do is just not all that interesting. I do not dispute that this is at least partly the case. But I think it falls far, far short of a complete answer. After all, even if writers might not necessarily write whole works about that reality, there would be some acknowledgment, here and there, in the occasional popular work, something more in those films which are fewer than they used to be but which still get made that aspire to art.

One explanation to which I have long inclined is the view that the avoidance of work is a matter of those who write the novels and films and television shows simply do not know very much about the world of work as the vast majority of people experience it, with Hollywood an obvious case.As David Graeber remarks in his book Bullshit Jobs,

Look at a list of the lead actors of a major motion picture nowadays and you are likely to find barely a single one that can't boast at least two generations of Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and directors in their family tree. The film industry has come to be dominated by an in-marrying caste.

Take, for an example, Joss Whedon-- hailed the world's "first third-generation television writer" a generation ago. Only a slightly more extreme version of the culture industry as a whole, virtually monopolized by the "liberal" elite of the coastal big cities, it is inconceivable that this kind of thing cannot have consequences for their frame of reference.

However, some fiction indicates that the problem isn't that writers don't know (even if this surely goes for a good many of them), but that there isn't so very much for the writers or anyone else to know--because (even if this is admittedly worth knowing in itself) work has substantially become a matter of bullshit jobs, not least the sort of bullshit job in which the apparently gainfully employed person does little to no work, to little to no useful end. There are not many such works, but they do exist, with the single most striking example in my mind Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road, which contains a scene reminiscent of the cocktail party anecdotes with which Graeber begins his book. John Givings (Michael Shannon, to those of you who only saw the movie), visiting with the couple living next door to his parents, the Wheelers, asksFrank Wheeler (Leonardo diCaprio) about his work at Knox Business Machines--"Whaddaya do you there? You design the machines, or make them, or sell them, or repair them, or what?"

Frank lamely responds

"Sort of help sell them, I guess. I don't really have much to do with the machines themselves; I work in the office. Actually, it's sort of a stupid job. I mean there's nothing--you know, nothing interesting about it, or anything."

And from what we see of Wheeler at his actual workplace, his description of his duties in the company's "Sales Promotion" department ("where nobody worked very hard except old Bandy") seems accurate enough. He and his colleagues come into work and then do not do very much but take up space in the office, drink and attempt affairs on their lunch hour, and sometimes cover for their colleagues' more extreme dysfunction, like Jack Ordway, representative of what happens to those who have been here too long, moving "from one glass cubicle to another," his career "distinguished by an almost flawless lack of work," and, save for those days "when a really bad hangover laid him low," walking around the office, charming others and making them laugh. Still short of that point, Frank nonetheless suffers from vague but severe discontents that threaten to tear him and his wife and his family apart, leading to a half-baked plan to relocate to Paris, and in the end domestic disaster.

The outcome is extreme, but far from inconceivable, and overall Yates' novel so powerfully dramatizes the dynamics Graeber's book discusses that I think it merits recognition as the first great novel first great novel about work in an age of bullshit jobs.

Moreover, it would seem that its accomplishment exerted an influence even before the novel was rescued from obscurity by Sam Mendes' film adaptation. While little read in the half century between its original publication and the screen version, those who did pay attention to it seem, disproportionately, to have been writers, while Yates had an interesting personal connection to one of the bigger (and more work-inclined) pop cultural phenomena of our time, Seinfeld. The show's cocreator, Larry David, dated Yates' daughter Monica for a time, and even wrote a Yates-like figure into the early episode "The Jacket."

Looking back, I am struck time and again by George Costanza's experience of work--how much of the time he does nothing, how he is constantly befuddled regarding his bosses' expectations of him. In "The Barber," after taking that job from Mr. Tuttle, the mystery of the Penske file is opaque, the broader situation Kafkaesque. Later, working for the New York Yankees, George makes a point of looking annoyed so as to create the illusion that he is busy, and builds a shelf under his desk so that he can discretely take naps during the work day. I never took it all that seriously. But it strikes me that Seinfeld, perhaps thanks to Yates' influence, had at least something to say about bullshit jobs as well.