Drayton and Mackenzie

There’s a healthy suspicion of novels where the substance of the characters’ working lives is relevant and actually explored. The formulas of TV do permit it. Throwing around finance jargon in Industry or showing off the prowess of the medical consultant team in The Pitt is normal. For the novel, it’s unbecoming to talk about work in the same way it makes you dull to turn to your dinner companion and bore them about your job. Work is not the life of the mind.

Drayton and Mackenzie is striking because it’s a story about two friends who go into business together. Against my expectations, hijinks don’t really ensue to depart from this premise. There are some personal sideshows for sure, but in the main this book is about two people and their careers. The two men start life in McKinsey, doing the grim consultancy work of laying people off in a depressed industry. Then, one of them has an idea. He convinces the other to follow him and they drop out to get started. Away we go.

I’m writing a novel at the moment and a lot of it hinges on what the company that the protagonist works for is up to. So I’m thinking about how to write about work. The entire structural premise of my story hides the true activities of the company from the protagonist and us the reader, and I think I did that for the distaste of writing about work straight on as much as I did for narrative tension. In Drayton and Mackenzie, there are long stretches where James Drayton thinks about business problems and ways to solve them. There are sections about raising capital.

I fucking hate thinking about all of these things in my actual life, so why would I write about them? Verisimilitude, I suppose. If you write a story about someone and a lot of the action takes place at work and there’s no actual work in it, it comes off as a bit false. The dullness of the paper company is a joke in The Office. In Severance, the irrelevance of the work itself is taken to a deliciously surreal extreme: you’re just putting numbers into boxes on a screen. The work is not the point; it’s about power and the mind.

I don’t know what I’m getting at. I don’t even know if Drayton and Mackenzie is good. It just came at a helpful time in my life as a provocation: can you really push the work out of your story?