One of the things I liked about Revolutionary Road is that it was an excellent novel about work, and how I’ve noticed there seem to be so few novels that really capture the worklife—especially considering how many hours we spend working!
Here are some of my favorite novels about work; please let me know if you have any additional suggestions:
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (life in a 1950s cubicle)
Bombardiers by Po Bronson (bond salesman, I believe—high-flying 80s financial biz)
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (advertising industry at the end of the dot-com bubble…remember how bad we thought those financial times were?!)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (the military, but really any job anywhere)
Independence Day by Richard Ford (real estate)
Intuition by Allegra Goodman (science lab)
I guess I'll add The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, though with an asterisk. It isn’t especially well-written and borders on preachy, but it certainly does talk in great detail about life in the Chicago meat-packing industry. I know more than I want to about that work life....
