Works of Art on the Art of Work

Art responds to work in Cary Fagan’s My Life among the Apes and Rebecca Rosenblum’s The Big Dream, two recent short-story collections set in and around Toronto, where so many Canadians go to find jobs. In an age when Canada’s finance minister declares that “there is no bad job” and when the minister of labour similarly opines that the economy should be considered an essential service to be protected from strikes, one of the major debates in this country is whether work is unquestionably good and even essential for everyone. Whereas these politicians might want to dissuade people from negotiating, assessing and interpreting work, the books under review offer a different suggestion: that our jobs and the economy would benefit more from creative thinking than from political strictures.

Not that either Rosenblum or Fagan subjects the reader to a political harangue. Their stories are about human beings whose minimal control over the economy drives their...