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| For a year, Barbara Ehrenreich journeyed though America’s working class, becoming, successively, a maid in Maine, a waitress in Florida, and a nursing home aide-then-Wal-Mart clerk in Minnesota. Throughout, she tried — and failed — to live solely off her paychecks. Such immersion journalism generally works best from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. The intrusion of a first-person voice risks succumbing to authorial narcissism — me, me, me! — at the expense of the people the author is writing about. But though Ehrenreich writes in first person, her honesty about her subjects and herself, her emotional commitment to the story and her detailed reporting (from analyses of macroeconomic trends to a repellent but vital disquisition on the types of shit a maid encounters when cleaning toilet bowls) more than compensate for whatever dramatic potential is sacrificed. And because most of her readers will share more in common with Ehrenreich than with the wage slaves whose plight she chronicles, they’re likelier to identify with her justified abhorrence of the new workplace’s dehumanizing authoritarianism, drudgery, and exploitation. She’s our spy in the house of labor. For writers, Nickel and Dimed demonstrates how rich material for literary nonfiction can be found beyond the glitzy, inconsequential subjects of so much of today’s journalism. And it reminds us that, notwithstanding the low income and commercial constraints which writers must endure, we should appreciate our autonomy and meaningful work. Perhaps more writers of literary nonfiction will take Ehrenreich’s success with this book as a clarion call to raise their gazes from their navels (or Britney Spears’) and apply their skills to telling stories that matter. — reviewed by Brett Campbell |
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