Hard Copy

The workplace novel is having a quiet moment, and it’s hard to resist the set-up of this example of the genre, in which its narrator, a lowly administrator at a start-up, develops an obsession with her only ally and confidante at the office: the printer. When a failed package delivery threatens to unravel the narrator and a ‘quick chat’ with the boss looms, she is in danger of reactivating her clinically diagnosed allergy to stress. The full horrors of office life provide rich material here, from the dreaded shared calendar invite to ‘fun’ activities at lunchtime to group emails containing motivational articles and ‘optional’ Friday after work drinks, while the precise company types represented by the characters named Marketing, HR, PR, Product and Partnerships will be cause for grimaces of recognition.

Underneath the satire though, Fien Veldman’s book is concerned with the disaffection created by an increasingly abstracted and insecure workplace, where the result of people’s labour is no longer clear or material, and social identity and class is not articulated through work. As increasing automation and AI pose an existential threat to almost every kind of industry and job, perhaps pursuing serious intimacy with our nonhuman workmates is the only sensible path ahead. Hard Copy’s Dutch setting includes allusions to the tourist economy that animates cities like Amsterdam, and the narrator’s observations of the sometimes-befuddled tourists that stumble around the city offer a stark contrast to her daily grind, and suggest another version of the question that underpins this story: ‘What is it that we’re all doing here?’