Nine to Five

Books Nine to five:

" The workday proves dull not only to the Computer Programmer, but to the novelist. When there's war to attend to, and heartbreak, and class struggle and familial strife and rage against the dying light, why would one preoccupy oneself, when endeavouring to write fiction, with the nine-to-five?
Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn't mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life. In The Great Gatsby, after surviving 'that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War', Nick Carraway heads east to learn the bond business. His decision comes swiftly, within the novel's first few pages; next we know, he's living in West Egg gainfully employed.
The move and the new career would be a momentous occasion in anyone's personal life, so much so that we might expect Fitzgerald to show Nick heading into work on his first day, meeting his supervisors and settling into his new office. Thankfully, only a page or two later, we meet Gatsby instead, and Fitzgerald's preoccupations - status and money and the vexing they do to one's heart and health - spring to the fore. We get hardly another peep out of Nick about the particulars of his profession. His next, perfunctory mention of it is 60 pages into the book: 'Most of the time I worked.' And 100 pages after that: 'Up in the city, I tried for a while to list the quotations on an interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel chair.'"