WORK TO DO: A Novel, like "The Office" only meaner

WORK TO DO: A Novel
JULES WERNERSBACH
University of Iowa Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, preorder now for delivery on 7 April 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When Eleanor founded Guadalupe Street Co-op in the early 1980s, she was in her mid-twenties and madly in love with her girlfriend, Meg. Together, they envisioned an idyllic grocery store owned by its workers and customers.

Forty years later, Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a loyal customer base, an antiquated business model, and a disgruntled staff. Roz, one of the store’s senior managers, is too caught up stalking her ex-wife online to notice that her girlfriend, Molly, is plotting with her coworkers to unionize. Roz also doesn’t see that Molly is not-so-secretly in a situationship with Randy, the dairy manager leading their collective.

Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op’s first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. The wind howls, the power goes out, and water creeps through the front door, as questions of who owns the grocery store and who has a right to its future are posed. And will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Hierarchies change people, at the top and at the bottom. They're good for, and at, that...yet we're told that being "a family" is not to be in a hierarchy by the kind of lefty person who sets up a co-op. (I was transported to Wheatsville as I read this.) If that's the case, what kind of family did you grow up in? Parents are our first bosses, our first gods. The idea of hierarchy is instilled in us by "bedtime" and "naptime" and, most hated of all, "bathtime." These activities are policed by Authority, ie parents. Thus from a young age we are in a hierarchy called "family"; soon enough, we begin to rebel. We desire to make our own choices, our own lessons learned our own way.

A unionization drive at a co-op is the business equivalent of adolescent rebellion. It felt to me as though all the characters were coping with adolescent emotional states throughout the story. The nature of any group is to experience friction in different strengths and around different topics of disagreement. This story pits idealism...no co-op anywhere ever is founded to make a profit...and pragmatism...how the hell can I pay rent and buy food this month? It's all tangled up with personality conflicts, old grudges, and the inevitable recrudescence of Being Right in any group attempting to make decisions.

Eleanor, the founder of the co-op, is parent to the idea and has powerful, forty-year-old ideas about the concept of the workers as family. Of course no one's paid enough, no one ever is because capitalism runs on scarcity. No matter that you're structuring a business on a cooperative model, you're still in a capitalist system, its pressures still apply. As the founder (owner is not applicable, they all own the co-op) Eleanor's investment is truly, intimately personal. It explains but does not excuse how thoroughly unpleasant Eleanor is during the whole book.

In point of fact, everyone from Randy the unionizer to Roz the manager, through to Eleanor the founder, is thoroughly unpleasant. Not one of them behaves empathetically, with kindness, or in any way not narcissistically. This is not the read for someone who needs to like the characters they're reading about. It's well-observed, with lots of clever lines; it's got the hurricane and its aftermath to give the reader a serious jolt of adrenaline; it's been part of everyone's experience to be a member of a hierarchy that's experiencing change. I was kept in the flow of the story by these structural realities while not invested in any one character's success. It was an interesting experience of being on the outside of a story, looking on as events unfolded, feeling myself caring in an abstract way about these folks.

Anyone who wonders if queer people running things, leftist running things, or multigenerational structure including all ages, are happier workplaces should read this story. Anyone who thinks life is better when x thing is the center of your work, your relationship, your mind should read this story. People are people. They do and say stupid, ill-advised things. Sometimes hurtful words are fixable, sometimes they aren't...don't think you're being Right will carry you through to inevitable victory...or even to happiness. It's all laid bare in Author Wernersbach's smoothly polished prose.

Read Work to Do when you're after a cautionary tale about hubris, a reminder that empathy is always a better choice, that cooperation trumps selfishness but does not necessarily mean getting what you want. It's a very grown-up person's book, and looks at queer people in all their messy, human glory...and snickers behind its hand.

THE LINES, a family's devastation in malaise-era US by a master of voices

THE LINES
ANTHONY VARALLO
University of Iowa Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four—the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy—in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was a teenager during the 1970s, already a survivor of a "broken family," though I suspect my own family was less broken than unformed...rather like the asteroid belt, widely dispersed bodies intersecting with silent violence when they bother to interact at all. Hence my interest in Author Varallo's first novel (after several story collections, including 2005's kid-themed This Day In History which I read in the Aughties and LOVED).

What strikes me first is how subtle Varallo is in making his points. "The mother," "the father" (much less in evidence beginning to end...I suppose that was inevitable), "the girl," "the boy," are all people with names though not in relation to each other. I have sisters...my sister is the mental name of each, after all I know who I'm thinking/talking about...and thus the message is sent. Author Varallo is narrating the novel from the inside, like any omniscient third person narrator...oh wait, he's not using omniscience...hm...so we're limited in our viewpoint but intimate with the thoughts and the only people who have names are outsiders and so the narrator is The Family?

Did I parse that correctly?

And, most importantly, does it matter...after all, I wasn't wondering about or even aware of needing to wonder about that until I started writing this review. I like it when I'm aware of a writer's writerly craft in hindsight. It is all too often the case in what I am told we should call "literary fiction" (isn't all fiction of necessity literary? even the televised, broadcast, projected kind? or am I too "big-tent" in my application of its definition?) that the overriding impression I, and many other readers, take away is, "how very hard it must have been to perform that feat." I love the hell out of Ducks, Newburyport and rated it almost five stars, but it's a very literary book, one that's got a huge amount of craft in its composition and good goddesses how much sweat and graft in the editing, and it shows.

I'm not against working for my pleasure; I'm against not including more work of the pleasurable reading sort in the category "literary." This novel is a pleasure read; it was a pleasure to read; the story was deeply relatable; and it didn't push its complexities of construction and creation at the reader. That's a good enough reason to read it right there, assuming broken-family fiction is one's thing. Sales figures suggest that it's a lot of peoples' jam...so come get you some.

I was deeply saddened by the father's ineffectual solipsism. He wasn't able to reach out from his gravity well of depression to connect with anyone, certainly not the mother in her angular, cutting unkindness. The girl, a highly competent person in the mother's mold, wasn't particularly ready for her role as leader to fall on her so soon; the boy, well, what a mass of inabilities he was, and isn't that depressingly familiar. Marcus, the bullying stepbrother brought into the family by the mother's decision to be Cliff's woman, is my worst nightmare of a human being. He decides to "teach" the boy how to be a man. It goes, unsurprisingly, horribly wrong and ends up as a major adolescent pissing match. As the nightmare of the blending family unfolds, there is a moment on pages 206–206 where the mother crystallizes the problems she's faced all her life in one paragraph:

And what is the mother to make of this scene, her son and Marcus locked into some kind of adolescent combat, while her husband's old coin bank, that banal and detestable thing, inexplicably smolders on a grill that had, as far as she can recall, only held burgers and hot dogs? Smoke, thick and unnatural, rises from the grill's lid. The air feels heavy with lighter fluid. If ruin has a scent, this back yard reeks of it. See the smoke drifting into the neighbor's yard, as real and substantial as the boy's tears, which he wipes now, his breath heaving in his chest. This family has seen enough tears to last them for a good long while, but each day seems to show up with a fresh supply, unaware of surplus. Human misery, there's never a shortage of it. Surely the neighbors will detect its odor, if they haven't already gotten too heavy a whiff this summer. This house where so much has gone up in smoke.

The mother puts her hand on the boy's shoulder, says, "Where's your sister?"

Uplifting it isn't, but rewarding it is. The world as seen through eyes much like my own. A pleasure not to be dismissed or belittled, that.

LESTER HIGATA'S 20TH CENTURY, love and death and family...spelunked and excavated for you to appreciate

LESTER HIGATA'S 20TH CENTURY
BARBARA HAMBY
University of Iowa Press
$16.00 trade paper or ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: “Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the lanai behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids.” Thus begins Barbara Hamby’s magical narrative of the life of a Japanese American man in Honolulu. The quietly beautiful linked stories in Lester Higata’s 20th Century bring us close to people who could be, and should be, our friends and neighbors and families.

Starting in 1999 with his conversation with his father, continuing backward in time throughout his life with his wife, Katherine, and their children in Hawai‘i, and ending with his days in the hospital in 1946, as he heals from a wartime wound and meets the woman he will marry, Hamby recreates not just one but any number of the worlds that have shaped Lester. The world of his mother, as stubbornly faithful to Japan and Buddhism as Katherine’s mother is to Ohio and conservative Christianity; the world of his children, whose childhoods and adulthoods are vastly different from his own; the world after Pearl Harbor and Vietnam; the world of a professional engineer and family man: the worlds of Lester Higata’s 20th Century are filled with ordinary people living extraordinary lives, moving from farms to classrooms and offices, from racism to acceptance and even love, all in a setting so paradisal it should be heaven on earth.

Never forgetting the terrors of wartime—“We wake one morning with the wind racing toward us like an animal, and nothing is ever the same”—but focusing on the serene joys of peacetime, Lester populates his worlds with work, faith, and family among the palm trees and blue skies of the island he loves.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LIBRARYTHING'S EARLY READERS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not every author has the fortitude to start a collection of stories with a story about the death of the title character. Hamby is to be applauded for this, it's gutsy! It isn't extremely successful, though, beacuse the unspooling of Lester Higata's life from 1946 to 1999 is unevenly presented and unevenly edited, as quite some several of these stories appeared in other venues before being collected here.

The very best story, the chef d'ouevre, is the delightful, fresh, energetic story of Lester's last day: "Lester Higata's String Theory Paradise." Waking up to a conversation with your dead father, one in which he bashes your equally dead Gorgon of a mother, is a pretty good clue that the rest of the day isn't going to be normal. And it is, oddly, very normal in its events and yet Lester's certainty that this is his last day on Earth manages to make all its events sharp and clear and dear to him. It's an excellent story. It's no surprise to me that this story appeared in TriQuarterly and was edited by the superb, talented, and very accomplished Susan Hahn. She impressed me mightily in our one professional contact, when she bought a story from one of my then-clients in my former life as an agent.

Well, I said the collection was uneven...and the next story, "Iniki Chicken", is proof of this. In and of itself, it's not a bad little piece, but it needed a pruning before being put in the show. It appeared in Southwestern Review, which magazine has a decent reputation, but the piece has an overwordy quality that detracts from Hamby's clean and simple message: "Looking at all the people gathered around the table, I wondered how so many different faces could be made in the image of one God? Maybe the Hawaiians were right, and there were many gods: {there follows a list of four gods and their areas of expertise, taking up a long paragraph}...But if there was only one God what could he possibly be like?..." A taut meditation on the nature of spiritual belief and its relationship to human interaction becomes a comparative religion lecture, and loses force and clarity. SO frustrating!

The strong stories outnumber the weak ones, fortunately: "Mr. Manago's Mango Trees" is bleak, but wryly witty; "Lani Dances the Zombie Hula in LA" is a spare, cold-eyed flensing of the way promise gets transmogrified into failure and misery; "Sayonara, Mrs. Higata" pitilessly shows the too-late-ness of deathbed regrets, and the hollow-yet-shining face of Duty's Daughters; and "Lester Higata in Love" is heartbreakingly tender and beautifully rendered, its landscape of love's losses and joys as mountainous as O'ahu itself.

The University of Iowa press sent this ARC to me as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. It's a pleasure to be able to recommend the collection to any reader even slightly interested in the geography of love.