what i'm reading

Welcome to the Working Week, Paul Vlitos

Letter writing has become, for most of us, a relic of a bygone age. With blogs and Facebook and the consequent broadcasting of one's private life, journal writing is probably in decline as well (is there anything we won't share anymore?). So too, I thought, had the novel or short story told through letters or journal entries, such as Alice Walker's The Color Purple or Alice Munro's A Wilderness Station.

But, literature adapts to the times. Instead of journal entries and letters, the contemporary epistolatory story writer has email. Welcome to the Working Week is a story about a guy trying to find himself after breaking up with his girlfriend, and it's told through a series of email conversations he has with his friends and family.

Clever, for sure. And at times pretty funny, too. But the problem with emails is that... they're just not letters. They are generally typed up and send off without much thought and they are augmented by text messages, instant chat and even real, live conversation. Read through a recent email conversation you've had with a friend. Is there a story there? Probably not.

Emails with recaps of whole evenings/weddings/weekends with the family (necessary to move the plot along since the reader would otherwise have no idea what happened outside of cyberworld) are hardly the norm. So Welcome to The Working Week feels forced and contrived.

On Friday at 12:30 Barney replied:

Well, you were on the table to demonstrate your Jagger dance. You'd just got everyone's attention when you went over and took all the drinsk with you. That was when you managed to whack Laura in the contact lens. So we were all looking for it and I thought you were too, but it turned out that you were looking for the slice of lemon peel you 'slipped' on, in order to prove you weren't drunk.

You were certainly claiming to be able to speak Japanese last night. You went off to find the management at one point in order to tell them we wanted another hour, and claimed you would negotiate a discount with your master of the language. Bit odd since the people at the desk weren't actually Japanese.

The book also employs another very contemporary habit of storytelling (thanks Seinfeld!). It talks about nothing, albeit in an entertaining way. For sure, there is a bit of a plot in there -- guy gets dumped by girlfriend, disastrously tries to win her back, then moves on. But the main character doesn't really change from start to finish. He and his friends just keep sending out those clever emails. And, like reading one of those email threads someone forwards you, it's just not that interesting after a while.