Vocational Kleptomania

Page 19 May–June 2009 We might consider Steal Stuff From Work an anti-capitalist manifesto in novel form, a call to arms whose urgency is dampened only by the malaise that washes the narrative. Debut novelist Jasper Pierce has created a world defined by worker dissatisfaction and its attendant resentment, recognizably ours but pushed a notch out of realism and into the realm of the neardystopic . That this near-dystopia hews so closely to social realism is telling, and shows a novelist hitting his mark with a strong indictment of the US labor system. Dramatizing the plight of various characters stuck in menial jobs with no benefits or health care, the book extends this realism into the speculative, imagining what might happen if such laborers united—and revolted. The results are mixed, making for a more complex argument than simply socialist revolution as easy fix. We follow Kemp as he moves from job to job, his fragmented narration effectively mimicking the fragmentary nature of a life lived in part-time, the uneasy feeling of losing one’s identity to multiple meaningless, disposable jobs. How to maintain some semblance of personal dignity in the capitalist workplace? Following Kemp’s logic, you steal stuff from work. He explains his MO early on: I’ve had jobs every day of my life since I was eight. My spirit had just about been hammered flat. Working took its toll on me, until the day I started taking my toll on it. I had become so exhausted and demoralized that by the end of the day I was no longer taking any of myself home from work. So I started taking some of my work home with me. As Kemp moves from job to job, from dishwasher to server to telephone book distributor to bookseller to Web designer to bed-and-breakfast lackey, he swipes, or helps others swipe, the following : steaks, alcohol, a mounted black bear, gardening tools, books, records, a city bus, a hotel room, the obligatory toilet paper, and more. He collects jobs; he collects things stolen from jobs. When he finds himself reunited with his old friend Jasper, who has made a home of his workplace , a Rent-a-Room inside the mall where Kemp distributes phone books, a revolution is hatched. Or rather, an already hatched revolution swells, as it’s really Jasper’s brainchild from the start, with Kemp putting aside his apathy to help make his friend’s vision reality. Jasper is more elusive and transitory than Kemp, his politics more radical; if this were Fight Club (1996) (and the two texts’similarities are worth noting), Jasper would be the Tyler Durden to Kemp’s anonymous narrator. Together, Jasper, Kemp, and their cohorts found Steal Stuff From Work Day, concentrating on spreading word to disgruntled employees nationwide in preparation for the November 11th holiday. Kemp builds a website where he uploads SSFW business cards to be downloaded and printed by their network of Kinko’s employees. The group plans and pulls off (or doesn’t quite) pranks like making CDs and playing them in stores that sell CD players. “When it explodes,” the mastermind explains, “the employees go to turn off the music and find a label on the CD with a note about Steal Stuff From Work Day.” Through these kinds of schemes, the group is able to organize and execute a day of mass-scale vocational kleptomania. Through relating these schemes, too, the novel acts as a how-to manual for the reader, its title functioning as much as a command as a description of the events its covers contain. A number of schemes are offered up as ways to blast holes in the system, ways to unite the masses. There is a note of caution, however, as the pranksters don’t always win. People get hurt. There are fires. Injuries. Citywide calamity. As all this goes on, Jasper, Kemp, and their crew are squatting in a farm-turned-commune guarded by stolen police cars. Kemp, the apathetic foil to Jasper’s radical socialist, asks himself whether this new situation is much better. Disillusioned with the community he has helped create, Kemp wants out, and...