A Labor of Loathing
Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real
harmony the instant he sets himself to work.
— Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present
Getting fired is a cut and dried process. Slack off, upset the wrong person, hit send on an e-mail
to a buddy before realizing it's actually headed to your boss; you're out. It's simple, it's
explainable. It's a hearty laugh five years later.
The layoff is a completely different beast. It's devastation. It's being cut loose from a job you
were trying to keep, one at which you were most likely satisfied. And, if your company is laying
off, chances are other companies are as well. You're just another swimmer diving headfirst into a
quickly evaporating pool.
Still, there's something even more insidious about the layoff. Not only have you been told you
are no longer worth the paycheck, but you're losing your job so someone higher up can keep his.
You're deemed worthless so a boss can keep the comfortable status quo.
It is this feeling -- the rape of a worker's dignity and the dread it begats -- that Iain Levison
starkly portrays in his first novel, Since the Layoffs.
The narrator, Jake Skowran, is a laid-off loading dock manager in Wisconsin who takes a job as
a hitman to pay the bills. Turns out, he's a pretty good hired gun.
Sadly, the story isn't the most unique, though Levison can hardly be blamed for that. The
newspapers have often told the story of newly unemployed workers going on killing sprees.
While revenge isn't Jake's trade, his new vocation is still murder.
That is the psychological peg to which Levison tethers a somewhat standard, hard-boiled plot.
When work becomes one's life, to be out of work is to lose touch with life. Once injected back
into the working world, Jake finds himself adapting to the nuances of the hitman life the same
way he would finagle a schedule as a manager. He is surprisingly pensive and calm about his
new job.
After some first-day jitters, Jake is so happy to have a job that the work becomes work. It gives
him a task at which he can improve and excel, not to mention a paycheck that will buy back his
pawned television. Though he never loses sight of how macabre his line of work is, he's now
earning. His logic is so twisted from the layoff's abuse, he's convinced of his own worth again.
Levison's prose isn't the most fluent or lyrical, which works for Jake's no-nonsense narration. But
there's a power in Levison's simplicity. He has stripped Jake's emotions. There is no sadness at
the loss of work or at what the factory closings has done to his Wisconsin town. Instead, there's a
resentment, a feeling of stiff-upper-lip helplessness. It is as if the rich are all around, pointing
guns at Jake's head. And before he gets his new gig, his only defense is to wait.
Though this is Levison's first novel, it is his second book. His first was the humorous, though not
exactly uplifting, Working Stiff's Manifesto, a memoir of 42 jobs he worked over the
course of 10 years. If there seems to be a thread between Levison's books, it is because he wants
it there. Levison's point is nothing new, but his books thus far have been fantastic studies of the
currently absurd labor environment and its crushing effect. In several interviews Levison has
described himself as cynical about the modern economy and the worker's ability to leverage a
meaningful job. And he is not talking about a life-affirming, soul-satisfying occupation -- just a
job that doesn't make the worker miserable and pays the rent.
Most books on work -- from Studs Terkel's Working to the catalog of "work
philosopher" Al Gini -- deal with it at its most basic, non-fiction level. They are intricate studies
of the role work plays in our lives. In fiction, however, there is a usual trope: the worker
oppressed by the greedy boss, and the audience's job is to root against the boss.
Levison's book sidesteps that cliché by removing the boss from the picture. The layoff is in the
past, the factory is closed, the oppressor has forgotten the oppressed. Instead of rooting against
an overseer, the reader is rooting solely for the worker. There is no evil boss, no conquerable
system. The hero just needs to tread water.
New fiction writers are often praised for their inventiveness and for their ability to take readers
down new paths. Levison won't garner such praise, though that's not to say he's not worthy of
acclaim. Aside from the killing, the drama is really of the most mundane sort, one which we all
see played out nearly every day with friends or family. We're simply rooting for the underdog to
get back on his feet, to earn a paycheck, to settle into a routine. These are the things that we
usually root against in fiction. We seek the unusual; we want adventure for the protagonist. And
that is precisely what makes this novel such a gripping work of fiction. It draws insight from a
relatively untapped source: the necessary motions of everyday life.
— 17 September 2003
