American fiction has a work problem. Blame it on an MFA system that shunts wannabe writers into the academy before they have time to scuff their sneakers in a break room or callous their hands on a broom handle. Blame it on an overwhelming literary consensus that there’s something sullying about implicating oneself in capitalism, even if it’s to document it. Or blame it on a conviction, among readers and writers alike, that the workaday world is plain old boring. Sure, you can name some terrific exceptions.1 But in much of modern American fiction, a job is merely a setting, handy for a narrative jolt (a promotion! a pink slip! an affair!) or a patina of verisimilitude.

​Continuing reading at ​The New Republic.