Book Review: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

Book cover of Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collarm edited by Richard Ford. Photo / Supplied

Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar edited by Richard Ford
Harper Perennial $28.99

Nifty title. Nifty concept. Stories about work - manual work; skilled work; responsible, itinerant, above-board or undercover work. Nifty aim, also: all proceeds go to fund youth literacy programmes across the United States.

So there are 32 pieces, from seven decades of writers, including a lot of high-wattage names.

John Cheever, Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, Eudora Welty are surrounded by a scrum of bright young American things.

A few see employment in a positive light: "the brief defined conviviality of work". Donald Barthelme has a surreal, subversive story of an adult claims assessor suddenly back in a sixth-grade classroom, en route to a cloakroom encounter of the close kind with his teacher. Cheever's old poet laureate wanders his Italian house, fretting over never having won the Nobel, before working his way via dirty ditties to his crowning opus on the "inalienable dignity of light and air".

More often, work is hard; work is serious; work is inescapable, "sedentary and repetitive and humdrum". It's a frame for lives in transit, tedium or trauma.

You see this in Junot Diaz's monosyllabic moving man; in Thomas McGuane's "dyin' way of life" cowboy; Ford's own grim, ultimately grisly glimpse of a career betrayed.

Elsewhere, Munro's 13-year-old watches gardener, teacher, masseuse, while she starts to comprehend power and death. Joyce Carol Oates has a typically feverish rendering of dirt-farmer, cop and claw-hammer. Welty's travelling salesman has his own hallucinatory meeting with silence. Wolff's lawyer swerves disturbingly near the edge of the law.

Inevitably, some authors write about the work of writing, redemptively in Cheever's case, warningly, in Nicholas Delbanco's narrative of the stellar young novelist who learns to dissect and deceive.

It's a curious collection in some ways. Ford says in his introduction that he never feels a character has "persuasiveness" unless he comes with a job description, yet a number of the pieces treat work almost as a distraction from personal agendas.

But the calibre of contributors is high, the range wide, the symbolism often deep - and dark. A format worth considering for New Zealand writers, provided it doesn't take them away from their ... work.

David Hill is a Taranaki writer.