When you read for a living, you get behind on your reading. And reading – the thing that always gave you the most pleasure – becomes less pleasurable. I am reading David Szalay's 2016 collection of short stories All That Man Is, a book that was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize last year, and I am filled with the nostalgic remembrance of what fun I used to have. Reading his simple, straightforward narratives about complicated situations – ethical problems in work and love, mostly, in a hyperconnected, money-obsessed, high-speed Europe – is like, as Thom Gunn writes, "water after too much birthday cake."
And it occurred to me that the reason for this rare sense of excitement for me is that a lot of this book is about work. Work as in jobs. There are people in offices arguing about what their company needs to do, in quite a lot of detail; there is a real estate marketer planning a complicated scheme with a developer. Szalay does not spare us the numbers – the costs, the acreages, the amount of time needed to fly from Denmark to Spain, the kind of gas an executive chooses to put in his rental car ("V-Power Nitro+").
It strikes me on reading this that work – especially business, the kind of nerve-racking calculations of expenditure and revenue that consume most people's days – has become rare in novels. I read a lot of novels about relationships, about love and the absence of it. I read a lot of stories in which the character's day at work or in class is very rapidly glossed over – "the dull workday passed quickly, and he was eager to read Melinda's letter as soon as he left" – as if the character's career and most of his waking hours are the boring bit, the bit to be skipped over so we can get to his troubling social life. Work gets excised the way trips to the bathroom do.
Whereas in one story in Szalay's collection, about a tabloid newspaper's decision to expose the secret affair of a cabinet minister, the thrill of the vindictive editor at his powerful role, at the long hours he puts in, at the adrenalin rush of his work, are his primary drive in life, his euphoria – stronger than love or lust. Exhausted after destroying someone's life, he refuses to go home. "There's nowhere else I want to be," he says.
In another story, a philologist travelling through Europe to meet his lover is distracted by the substance of a paper he is preparing to write, and excited the whole way at how it might advance his career and status. Szalay has done research on the academic's obscure area of expertise, too – Old English vowel shifts – and details of his argument ("in the pre-West Saxon period, ae sometimes reverted to a …") flash across his thoughts for verisimilitude.
Work isn't irrelevant: Work is what drives us and distracts us. The novel of family, memory and loss is great but the novel of competition, ambition and achievement seems far less popular.
Which reminds me: Men don't read fiction. The stats say so, the editors and publicists say so, and the men tell me this themselves. They say they read non-fiction instead, for facts, for information, to find out how stuff works. But when men discover how physical-problem-oriented fiction can be, they get madly excited about it. Case in point: The Martian, the self-published 2015 novel by Andy Weir. It became a massive bestseller and a Hollywood film was made of it. The reason for its success was not its literary style nor its subtle skill with relationships. It explains that you can burn hydrazine to manufacture water, and how long a solar battery will hold a charge. It's about how stuff works.
There used to be a stronger link between journalism and fiction. In the 19th century, Émile Zola researched a different field of endeavour for every novel – farming, railroads, a large department store, a theatre and the stress and possibility of the workday in each of these milieux is central to the characters' ambitions.
I'm not arguing for the superiority of one theme over the other, nor making a claim, as Tom Wolfe did in 1989, for the superiority of the 19th-century "systems novel" (his famous essay on that subject was based on false dichotomies). Nor – for one second! – suggesting that women wouldn't like work-themed novels either. I'm just saying that reminding the non-fiction dudes in your life that practical-problem-oriented fiction exists out there may help our suffering bookstores.
With this goal in mind, let me recommend a few novels that deal in an exciting way with business and technology and other non-love stuff. You already know about Dickens and Zola and Jonathan Franzen (he follows in the 19th-century "systems-novel" tradition, with side plots about international arms deals, new drugs, hacking, not-for-profit journalism foundations, all kinds of new jobs). If you like those, you may like Dave Eggers's The Circle, set in a cult-like Silicon Valley tech company. A great deal of the novel takes place in office cubicles, and it captures the adrenalin of receiving demanding e-mails and meeting increasingly unrealistic daily challenges and performance evaluations.
But what about the Canadians, you shout? Okay: How about Colin McAdam's first novel Some Great Thing: It's about a suburban property developer and a civil servant in charge of development from two sides of a class barrier. They have messed up families and sex, too, of course, but the mechanics of urban planning are intriguing. Matt Lennox's novel The Carpenter is about contractors, and is convincing as to how much they love what they do. It's got lots of comforting details about concrete and tools, plus violence. Sheree-Lee Olson's novel Sailor Girl is about a woman working on Great Lakes freighters; its grease and diesel seem real.
There are others, but I want to hear your list. Send me your favourite books about work: rsmith@globeandmail.com.