Books in Brief: Not Working

Not Working, by Harry Maurer (Holt, Rinehart, 297 pp., $ 12.95). Maurer, a Nation editor, copies the interview format and negatives the title of Working in hopes of selling his conversations with the unemployed to the huge audience won by the radio man from Chicago. That’s how spinoffs work—by twisted resemblances—but Maurer’s dies in flight. Where Studs Terkel is painstakingly neutral, appreciating the frustrations of workers but keeping his distance, Maurer sets forth a political program—to the left of Humphrey-Hawkins —even before the interviews begin. Where Terkel’s people speak from backgrounds so diverse that, taken together, they sound as cacophonous as a steel mill, Maurer’s are almost exclusively soreheads. With the maddening regularity of air hammers, they rattle off complaints about lousy bosses, boring work, and low pay. They inveigh against CETA cuts and skimpy welfare. They chart their emotional ups and downs with the technical precision of psychologists. (Just one of them is academically qualified to do so.) And what they don’t say for themselves Maurer tries to say for them: “Work [is] an essential passage into the human community”; “To hold a job should be the right of every citizen”; etc. The impression he strives to create is that his subjects are desperate. But after they’ve finished griping, many admit that things aren’t so bad and are likely to get better. For some, things are pretty good already. The driveway of one unfortunate contains a late-model Ford and a Honda motorcycle. An out-of-work librarian, undergoing what Maurer says is “trial by idleness,” is on the verge of marriage and a honeymoon in Jamaica. She says, “I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my unemployment runs out right around the time we’ll be getting back.”

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Paul T. Hornak

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Not Working, by Harry Maurer (Holt, Rinehart, 297 pp., $ 12.95). Maurer, a Nation editor, copies the interview format and negatives the title of Working in hopes of selling his conversations with the unemployed to the huge audience won by the radio man from Chicago. That’s how spinoffs work—by twisted resemblances—but Maurer’s dies in flight. Where Studs Terkel is painstakingly neutral, appreciating the frustrations of workers but keeping his distance, Maurer sets forth a political program—to the left of Humphrey-Hawkins —even before the interviews begin. Where Terkel’s people speak from backgrounds so diverse that, taken together, they sound as cacophonous as a steel mill, Maurer’s are almost exclusively soreheads. With the maddening regularity of air hammers, they rattle off complaints about lousy bosses, boring work, and low pay. They inveigh against CETA cuts and skimpy welfare. They chart their emotional ups and downs with the technical precision of psychologists. (Just one of them is academically qualified to do so.) And what they don’t say for themselves Maurer tries to say for them: “Work [is] an essential passage into the human community”; “To hold a job should be the right of every citizen”; etc. The impression he strives to create is that his subjects are desperate. But after they’ve finished griping, many admit that things aren’t so bad and are likely to get better. For some, things are pretty good already. The driveway of one unfortunate contains a late-model Ford and a Honda motorcycle. An out-of-work librarian, undergoing what Maurer says is “trial by idleness,” is on the verge of marriage and a honeymoon in Jamaica. She says, “I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my unemployment runs out right around the time we’ll be getting back.”