Job Shadowing
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Book*hug is excited to publish Job Shadowing, the first full-length fiction work by Malcolm Sutton, the widely published interdisciplinary artist and writer (and Book*hug's own Fiction Editor).
As well as being thematically driven by the increasingly precarious employment situation of the present and the inescapable legacies of the Baby Boom generation, Job Shadowing interrogates ways in which two people can exist together in tight proximity: as a woman married to a man; as an ambitious employee joined to a problematic shadow; as an idealistic artist dependent on a wealthy employer; and as multiple generations negotiating their statuses with one another.
In crosscutting between two storylines, Sutton's work combines the transformational-fantastic with crystal-clear contemporary reality: In the first storyline, 40-year-old Gil, drawn by the promise of a job opportunity, becomes the real shadow of an ambitious 23-year-old woman employed by an educational company. In the second, Gil's wife, Etti, seeks a more lucrative source of income while expanding the limits of her artistic practice. Little does she expect that, upon venturing into a new line of work as memoirist to the ultra-wealthy Caslon, her role will go far beyond being a writer to something more like a mute witness to all of her client's worldly actions, from the mundane to the speculative to the violent. It is under these seemingly unbreakable contracts that Gil and Etti's lives are propelled into territories of ethical uncertainty, forcing them to rewrite their imagined futures.
Sutton's plot- and idea-driven novel delivers an imaginative take on the contemporary crisis in work, particularly as it relates to identity and belonging. Its interrogative style, likened to the avant-garde writing of Tom McCarthy in Satin Island, explores the processes of art-making in our present social and economic moment. All of this makes Job Shadowing an intriguing and topical book that will appeal to readers of contemporary literary fiction with an experimental edge, and specifically people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who might relate to the speculative world of un(der)employment living.
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.
