Gig
by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter
Crown

Have you ever wanted to know what it's like to be an Elvis impersonator? Ever been waved through road construction and asked yourself, "Gee, I wonder what life is like as a highway flagger?" Ever been watching TV, marveling at just how tasty they make that McDonald's hamburger look, and wondered if there's someone who does that for a living (there is, in fact). If so, "Gig: Americans Talk about their Jobs at the Turn of the Millenium" is the book for you.

"Gig," edited by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, is a collection of dozens of interviews with Americans about their jobs. It sounds like a potential sleeping pill, and very well could have been, but the book turns out to be a rich mosaic of our contemporary work culture. The interview questions are edited out, allowing the interviewees' stories to come across as unbroken, unprompted narratives (the editors explicitly modeled the book on Studs Terkel's 1972 book "Working," which was written in the same vein).

Indeed, if a picture paints a thousand words, "Gig" describes a thousand pictures — the life of a drug dealer, the thoughts of a bookie. But like a good painting, these minutely detailed images come together to show us an amazingly deep, amazingly human perspective onto what Americans think of the life of work.

And "Gig" is a lot of fun. We get to know up close and personally about the crime-scene-cleaning business, the day-to-day activities of an adult webmistress. We get to read what it's like to do the jobs we've never even imagined, but take for granted nevertheless — the slaughterhouse human resources director, for example.

The best part of "Gig," though, is the light it sheds on the jobs we already know of: construction foreman, pretzel vendor, flight attendant. These folks, whom most call the "working class," don't spend their time complaining about their lives, or wishing they could move up the income ladder. Rather, they take a decidedly un-New-Economy approach to their jobs — they take pride in what they do, but also realize their jobs are just jobs, that they have lives, friends and families outside the workplace and that money is not the key to happiness.

If the book has any flaws, it is the way so many of the interviews tend to devolve into a small set of pattern statements: Most people conclude that their job has its ups and downs, but that it's worth hanging around for; a few (such as, oddly enough, the crime scene cleaner) express a fanatic devotion to their trade; the rest hate their jobs and want to quit as soon as possible. And predictably, these attitudes correspond to three broad categories: respectively, people in traditional working-class careers like truck driver and smokehouse pit cooks; people in bizarre careers like the porn star or the food stylist; and lastly the people in bottom-of-the-barrel jobs like the poultry factory worker.

This sort of redundancy makes "Gig" a little boring at times, but it's hard to say this is anyone's fault; after all, the book makes no pretensions to be anything other than a window onto the American workplace. And while sometimes that view gets old, at other times it is captivating, endearing and even heartbreaking. "Gig" ranks among the best books about living and working in the United States to come out in a long time.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)