Clocking In, Hauntings, and Sticking It to the Patriarchy: Seven Novels on the Workplace

We come for the high-stakes drama, the quiet poignancy, the intricate structure, and the liquid, perfect sentences. We often stay because we see ourselves and our experiences in the pages.

Many of us look to fiction as a way to better understand reality, to better navigate the world around us.

We know that good fiction illuminates the human condition and reflects our world in ways nonfiction cannot. Great novels explore the big themes of our existence and take us inside all kinds of settings and arenas where people live life: big cities, small towns, the great outdoors, the battlefield, creepy old hotels, “the shire.”

But there’s one arena, one could argue, that fiction doesn’t take on quite as much as we might imagine: the workplace. Given that we spend about a third of our lives there, it’s a bit surprising that there isn’t even a BISAC code (Book Industry Standards and Communications, a globally accepted system for categorizing books) for workplace fiction. “Workplace” is in there, but it’s a sub-category of “romance.”

I’ve written two novels, Where You Once Belonged and The Ghost of Greenwich Village, both set largely in the workplace. I’ve found it satisfying to explore my industry (broadcast journalism) through flawed characters who desperately want to get it right, but are thwarted by everything from personal shortcomings to multinational parent companies. I’m hoping my books help readers better understand this constant in all our lives, just as the seven novels on this list have inspired me with their insights.

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Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

Arriving during the time when #MeToo stories were still popping up regularly in newspapers, Chandler Baker’s best-selling Whisper Network landed with all the weight of an indictment. Four women work at Truviv, an athletic wear corporation. When the CEO suddenly dies, the women learn that their problematic boss, Ames Garret, is slated for the job.

One thing that’s often told via whisper is secrets, and this novel’s characters pack plenty. One of the women once had an affair with Ames, and he’s been holding it over her head ever since. After a new employee, the young and attractive Katherine, enters the mix, the other women decide they need to take action before Ames can abuse her, too.

The book makes the case that one of the things that keeps women down is their (sometimes self-imposed) separation. As Baker writes, ”

How few words we said to each other in the elevator….What did we really know about each other? We were separated by steel and scaffolding….We needed only to have knocked on the door of one another’s worlds to find out how our histories knitted themselves together, weaving shared threads into a noose of our own making.

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry, also a bestseller, offers a look at women in two workplaces. Rather than an emphasis on collective action, however, this novel lionizes the individual woman with pluck.

In the 1950s, Elizabeth Zott is a budding but beleaguered chemist at Hastings Research Institute in California. She is an experiment her boss has no intention of allowing to become successful:

Meyers was…famous for being a lecher….But Elizabeth did not leave—she couldn’t, she needed the Master’s. So she endured the day-to-day degradations….Until the day he called her into his office, ostensibly to talk about her admittance to his doctoral program, but instead shoving his hand up her skirt. Furious, she forcibly removed it, then threatened to report him. “To whom?” he laughed.

A twist of fate later and Elizabeth is hosting a TV cooking show, which should be far friendlier ground, and it is—except that she’s still patronized. In both work environments, she sticks it to the patriarchy: with smarts, grit, a sharpened No. 2 pencil in one case and in another, a chef’s knife.

Author Garmus may not have written Chemistry with the hope of changing readers’ lives, but, as she told The New York Times, it’s done just that: “People have quit their jobs and gone back to school…because they recognize themselves,” Garmus said.

Calvin Kasulke, Several People Are Typing

Calvin Kasulke’s playful Several People Are Typing, a GMA Book Club pick, can be seen as an answer to the question: What if Slack ate a novel? This fast-paced, surreal story is made up entirely of Slack messages exchanged by the colleagues of an unnamed PR agency.

Typing begins with the protagonist, Gerald, creating a spreadsheet to weigh the pros & cons of various winter coats he might buy. He soon finds, to his horror, that he’s somehow uploaded his entire consciousness to Slack, where it is now imprisoned. Alarmed, Gerald pleads with the “Slackbot” for assistance in getting his psyche out:

Gerald: uninstall.
Slackbot: I searched for that on our Help Center. Perhaps these articles will help:
~Change your time zone
~Manage your password.

Gerald’s colleagues (understandably) take a while to grasp what has happened to him but, hilariously, once they catch on, they are mostly sanguine. One office confab kicks off with, “Nikki: We’re hosting the meeting over slack because Gerald is stuck in the computer, Louis.”

The novel, which seems to fly by in the space of a coffee break, brilliantly captures a key particular of modern office life: the inside jokes and mores that grow so organically and thickly that they are almost impenetrable to outsiders.

An employee named Tripp tries to explain the genesis of one particular in-joke to his new colleague, Beverley. Her response: “‘That sounds kind of cult-sh.'” To which Tripp replies, “‘What is a workplace but a cult where everyone gets paid, really?'”

Daisy Buchanan, Careering

No list of workplace fiction would be complete without a nod to what the young and striving are up against. And, after nearly thirty years, Bridget Jones’ Diary still casts a long and charming shadow in this regard. Careering, by British journalist Daisy Buchanan, reads, at first, a lot like Bridget. It’s funny, it’s facile.

But here there are two heroines: A twenty-something named Imogen and her boss, forty-something Harri. Both slave away under the eye of another female boss, the unpleasable American, Mackenzie Whittaker. Sentences and mishaps zoom by and pile up. Harri wears her favorite new dress for her big promotion, only to find out she isn’t getting it. Imogen, too busy to leave her desk, eats edible underwear as a snack.

But the story of a young woman in media gets a dark, Gen Z update. When Imogen begins work at a feminist online startup, she’s tasked with writing about sex, specifically, her own sex life. After divulging the details of a reluctant threesome she once had, she’s deployed to a naked speed dating event and an after-work orgy.

Imogen provides a poignant summation of her generation’s frustrations with trying to get and keep a meaningful job: “I know, better than anyone, that a career…isn’t a right. It’s a prize to be won, through late nights, and extreme tiredness, and fear and vulnerability and humiliation. Being a good writer isn’t good enough.”

Hilary Leichter, Temporary

If you’re a member of late-stage capitalism’s gig economy and you’re never quite sure of what job you’re at on any given day or what you’re supposed to be doing, Temporary by Hilary Leichter is here for you.

The novel is a parable about an unnamed young woman working her way through a sea (sometimes literally) of temp jobs on her way to the state she hopes to achieve, “the steadiness.” She comes from a temping family, we learn, as her mother once filled in for the Statue of Liberty.

Jobs include being a family’s friendly ghost, a pamphlet distributor, a blimp operator, a barnacle (only on a rock, not on a whale which would constitute a huge promotion), and swabbing the deck on a pirate ship. She’ll need sea legs for this, just as she does for navigating her way through the slipperiness of always being the guest star, never the series regular. She inhabits a world where a worker would give anything just to achieve toehold status.

A clever and poignant touch that lifts the book into thirty-thousand-foot territory is a series of interspersed passages chronicling the life of the “First Temp,” who worked for “the gods who invented everything”: “‘Burn this bush,’ one god said, and so she did. ‘Now put the bush back the way it was,’ another god said, and so she learned the drudgery of tasks done and undone….”

It plays as a subtle nod to the sense that we’ve been plugging up holes with disposable human beings since pretty much the dawn of time.

Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

To some, the workplace is absurd. To others, it’s a portal to something troubling, even dangerous. Enter the workplace thriller.

In thrillers, as we know, things are rarely what they seem and boy are they not in The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris. In this audacious novel, the workplace is something of a wokeplace, at least on the surface, with white employees at a well-regarded publishing house expressing earnest appreciation for the company’s DEI initiatives.

The initiatives don’t seem to have translated into anything very real, which is why there is precisely one Black person working at Wagner Books, an editorial assistant named Nella Rodgers. Nella has long felt like she has to leave a piece of herself at home:

Her colleagues, strangely, had made it clear very early on that they didn’t really see her as a young Black woman, but as a young woman who just happened to be Black—as though her college degree had washed all of the melanin away. In their eyes, she was the exception. She was “qualified.” An Obama of publishing, so to speak.

As the book opens, though, there’s a new hire and “the other black girl,” Hazel May McCall, shows up. Finally, Nella has an ally at the office. Or does she? Soon she finds herself undermined by Hazel, though there’s always an innocent explanation. And she starts getting frightening, anonymous notes that say things like, “Leave Wagner. Now.”

Harris, who based the New York Times bestseller on her own experience working as an assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday, delivers a propulsive mystery that seems to ask, Can you succeed in corporate America and still hold onto your blackness?

It’s is a tall order. Would there was something to make it easier. In this novel, thanks to a turn toward the speculative, there is something. But the price is both steep and disturbing.

Christian Jungersen, The Exception

Scandinavians are known for their skill with the high-minded thriller and The Exception, by Christian Jungersen, is no exception. In this novel, four women work at the fictional Danish Center for Information on Genocide. Their mission is critical and noble, but the workaday aspect of their days is brought to life in all its deliciously petty, relatable glory.

There’s a door in the office that separates one woman from the other three. It can’t be left open because one of the three woman is worried about drafts. The one on her own, who’s newest to the group, feels left out and later, bullied, causing her to spiral: “As she types, she realizes that she’s losing control. I shouldn’t be feeling like this, she thinks. They’re turning me into a different Anne-Lise…She imagines each tap on the keyboard as if it were a knife plunging into Malene’s body. Or Iben’s.”

The women’s work output is also highlighted, with the inclusion of passages written by the characters that explore the twentieth century’s most notorious real-world atrocities. This allows Jungersen to meditate on the nature of evil by juxtaposing how it functions on a grand-scale (genocide) with how it plays out on the mundane level of office politics.

The distance between the two is called into question after some of the women receive threatening emails, prompting colleagues to wonder whether they come from a war criminal they’ve profiled or the person in the next cubicle.

Anyone who’s ever had their yogurt swiped from the office fridge for the umpteenth time or overheard a couple of snarky colleagues talking about them from behind the doors of bathroom stalls, and thought of what a good weapon a stapler might make, will surely relate.

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Where You Once Belonged by Lorna Graham is available via She Writes Press.