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Pinstripe Poets
| Article
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20326 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
3,229 Words |
| Author
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Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
THE LITERATURE OF WORK
Short Stories, Essays, and Poems
by Men and Women of Business
Sheila E. Murphy, John G. Sperling, and John D. Murphy
University of Phoenix Press, 1991
304 pp., $24.95
Asked by a well-known literary critic his profession, the poet M. Dana Gioia, a vice president of Kraft Foods, allowed as how he was involved in "mergers and acquisitions." The critic appeared puzzled, so Gioia explained in simple terms the meaning of his job. The learned critic was still at sea. Finally, after several attempts to discover the man's level of financial knowledge, Gioia realized he was up against more than an economic dunce--"In fact, this man of strong political opinions remarked that he never read any articles about business or the economy. His ignorance not only didn't bother him. He was visibly proud of it--as if this innocence of commercial and financial affairs signified a certain spiritual and ideological purity."
Gioia's insight into the attitudes of our aesthetic commissars towards the complex, multifaceted world of commerce is just one of scores of fresh datum culled from this provocative anthology of writers, who feel more at home at a marketing meeting than at a creative writing seminar. What these writers are offering in fiction, essay, and poetry are refreshing, hands-on insights drawn from people in the real world of commerce. And what their work implies is that our so-called serious writers have virtually ignored, with some exceptions, the vital possibilities of the white-collar world as source material for serious fiction. A fairly new phenomenon, this. As the nature of work has metamorphosed in the past two decades, writers have increasingly drifted out of touch with these seismic shifts, thus limiting their audience to a dwindling academic fraternity and consumers of tedious novels about dysfunctional families. The flagship offering of the new University of Phoenix Press, this anthology attempts with varying degrees of success to explore some of those new possibilities, and to "establish a new genre in American letters: creative writing about men and women in business."
While the idea and meaning of work has always been a vital theme for our best writers for decades, the eighties saw a curious thing happen. While neo-Sammy Glick yuppieism attained a quasi-religious awe unseen previously, the new forms of work itself remained unexamined. Even as publishers reaped fortunes
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