Job Shadowing
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
My slow adaptation is to her a sign of my being ‘outside life.’
An unemployed man, losing his ability to imagine a future self, disappears into the shadow world of an ambitious millennial. His wife, an idealistic artist at the turning point of her career, falls deeper and deeper into the gravitational field of her ultra-wealthy employer.
Job Shadowing is a novel of our 20th-century desires torn asunder by the new millennium. Through stylish, searching prose, it tests the grounds of impossible love, generational identity and middle-class fantasy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sutton's first novel, an abstracted, somewhat minimalist exploration of present-day employment, follows two intercutting story lines. Through the conceit of job shadowing, Sutton investigates the proximity between individuals of different classes both social and economic and how and in what ways they can coexist. Victoria is a corporate ladder-climber who feels trapped in place. She is being shadowed by Gil, Etti's husband. Etti is an artist attempting to secure funding for future work. She takes a job writing the life story of Caslon, a by-the-numbers one-percenter who views his wealth, whiteness, and maleness as the capital that elevates his story above others. The narrative is a clearly a response to the current financial landscape in North America; however, the academic veil between the story and the characters keeps the reader at arm's length. Etti and Victoria seem to exist more for the purpose of conveying theme than anything else, and though the book's themes are important, they lack depth due to the paltry characterization. The setting is also thinly sketched and emotionally distant, and the work as a whole is all thesis and no substance.
