The Dystopian Office Novels of Sarah Rose Etter and Ling Ma

Original Art and Review by Josh Steinbauer

"LING MA in conversation with SARAH ROSE ETTER" (ink on paper. 11x14". Josh Steinbauer, 2024)

The toxic workplace as the backdrop for a hero’s journey gets an update with every generation. A movie like Brazil builds a science fiction out of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Office Space milks the same absurdity for laughs. 9-to-5 rips into the chauvinism of the 80s office, while Fight Club derides the 90s C-suite for rampant greed. Many of the films that reflect our “work culture” back to us and go on to become cultural touchstones began as novels. Ling Ma and Sarah Rose Etter have both refreshed the cinematic SOS coming from the vacuous trenches of our current corporate hellscape.
 
Ling Ma’s Severance came out in 2018, and went viral, so to speak, in 2020 for its heroine Candace navigating a world-wide plague from China. This is the quiet sort of zombie apocalypse. No one’s eating brains. The infected simply go through the motions of their work day without a thought, robotically, taking care of nothing else as their body rots away. As her NYC office steadily empties out, Candace continues to fulfill her contract, eventually moving in out of convenience while the city slowly shuts down and civilization dissolves. Beyond arriving as the Nostradamus of everyone's pandemic reading lists, Ma also became a voice of millennial disenchantment:

The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers.

The horsemen of Sarah Rose Etter’s apocalypse are the bosses and coworkers of a Silicon Valley start-up. Her novel Ripe (2023) skewers the tech strain of corporate culture: the condescending bro-grammers, the sadistic supervisors, the egomaniacal CEOs. Cassie, 30-something, lands a well-paying marketing copywriter job, but develops a drug habit to ward off the daily pressures and hostilities. Without a work/life balance or an office ally to share a raised eyebrow against the company’s cult of ‘true believers’, she’s losing faith in her own decisions. The salary that was once a boon is only barely keeping her head above water in a city of such extremes:

​Here, I am surrounded by all of the signs of money crushing the life out of a place: the rich live inside tall town homes, the poor live in faded dirty tents if they are lucky, there are boarded-up businesses next to new juice bars, people either defecating in the streets or buying gourmet groceries, eating at overpriced restaurants or out of the dumpsters in the back alley.

​Late capitalism in San Francisco IS the dystopia. Her chronicle of the daily signs of money crushing the life out of a place are internal monologues delivered to a black hole that’s hovered alongside her since childhood. The black hole doesn't speak, merely shrinks or expands or changes position to make itself known. It’s a symbol of depression, both looming danger and longtime companion.
 
Having a black hole as an imaginary frenemy is a staid bit of surrealism for Etter. By contrast, her first novel, The Book of X, is a bonkers wonderland. We follow a very similar protagonist (also named Cassie) in a coming-of-age story about a girl born with her stomach tied in a hereditary, painful knot. She grows up on a meat quarry, and discovers that like her father and brother, she has a kind of meat-divining power, an instinct that tells her where to dig that’ll yield the best meat harvest. While the mechanics of the meat quarry are Cronenbergian, it’s not so different from growing up on any other farm. Her best friend is a wild child sneaking over in the middle of the night to goad Cassie into stealing the family tractor and drunk-crashing it into a barn. Her overbearing mother behaves like any number of overbearing mothers, except that the latest diet fad she espouses is sucking the nutrients off a smooth stone—get your nutrition while keeping your figure! It’s the sort of bleak comedy that becomes allegorical when we return to Cassie suffering unrequited longing while sucking on her breakfast rock.

Where the two Cassies overlap is in the workplace. The lack of meaning or challenge precipitates the need to learn one fact each day to keep the mind sharp. Thus, a droll work day is punctuated with knowledge that the loneliest animal is a whale who's been calling for a mate for 2 decades; that "Stewardesses" is one of the longest words typed with only the left hand; that a typist’s fingers travel 12.6 miles on the average work day, etc. These curiosities sparkle in the murk of their corporate internment, but cannot inspire someone drained to the point of despondency:

​How does anyone bear themselves? How can anyone stare into the darkest corners of humanity and return to the office, enter the meeting room, and deliver the presentation? How do we all just keep working?

​Most reviews of these books either ignore the critiques of capitalism or sideline them as ‘didactic’. The connection these books make from the American workplace to depression, however, feels definitive. Maybe it’s my own decades lost to NY agencies, but it’s cathartic AF to finally share a workplace eyeroll with these characters, to hear them justify their stagnance in very similar ways. Was my corporate grind better than other kinds of work I’d done? Sure! (For the record, the hotdog rooms in meat packing plants are the fodder of Saw movies and exposés.) But the notion that things could be worse doesn’t stop an encroaching depression for Candance or Cassie, nor a crust of nihilism over that place deep within us that knows people were born for better things. Maybe I’m just reading into it, but the whimpers of malaise in these books are screaming.

(Simon & Schuster, 2023)

(MacMillan, 2019)

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Josh Steinbauer is an artist and filmmaker in NYC. Selections from his series of author portraits and multi-disciplinary reviews (Portrait of a Book Report) have been published in The Offing, Rain Taxi, Harpy Hybrid, EpicenterNYC, Untenured, and InParenthesis. [email protected]