by Wayne Spitzer

Created on: June 10, 2009   Last Updated: June 12, 2009

See, I Am the Vacuum Cleaner: Using the Patently Absurd to Expose the Patently Obvious

It would be too easy, perhaps, or at least too obvious, to focus only on Ehrenreich's use of humor as a matter of craft. It's everywhere in Nickel and Dimed, it's hilarious, it's relatable, one would hope, to almost everyone, and it's the single most important factor in rendering Ehrenreich likable to readers not nearly so fortunate as she. Her humor is anodyne for the creeping elitism which hangs over the first several pages like a cloud. More than a humorist, Ehrenreich is an absurdist; again and again she finds those naked pulse points which fiction writers like Vonnegut and Heller are so adept at mining. War is absurd, say Vonnegut and Heller. And so is the Accutrac employment test. But that doesn't mean one can't find themselves at the mercy of either. And what may separate the merely funny from the completely absurd is that while the soldier may laugh, war isn't kidding, and neither is the Accutrac. Being an Absurdist in an Absurd Land is serious business.

A good example of Ehrenreich's absurdist bent is her use of dialogue on page 74, during the narrator's pre-employment training at The Maids. Dialogue, as any writer knows, must justify its existence. It must earn its keep; it should, in a carefully modulated text, punctuate, precisely as it does here. Understanding this, and understanding, too, that 'brevity is the soul of wit,' Ehrenreich uses dialogue in this paragraph (and it's a long paragraph, running 22 lines and spilling onto the next page) sparingly. She uses it precisely once, after some exposition in which she describes the inventor of a backpack vacuum explaining, via videotape, how the mechanism is worn, and saying, proudly, "See, I am the vacuum cleaner."

What makes the paragraph absurd is that it's really no laughing matter; to The Maids, that's exactly what Dr. Ehrenreich will be. The delivery is funny but the thematic under-current is not, no more than is the fact that one of The Maids' competitors uses the slogan, "We clean floors the old-fashioned way-on our hands and knees," or that this slogan seems to ring the bell, as it were, for the industry's clientele. Writes Ehrenreich, "A mop and a full bucket of hot soapy water would not only get a floor cleaner but would be a lot more dignified for the person who does the cleaning. But it is this primal posture of submission, and of what is ultimately anal accessibility that seems to gratify the consumers

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>