Author: Jennifer Graham

(MCD, 240 pages)

Cory Doctorow writes with a cynic’s eye about the frontiers of technology, with titles including Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, Chokepoint Capitalism and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Although he is primarily a writer of science fiction, he has opinions about how technology is changing society for the worse, and he scratches the itch to share those opinions with a popular newsletter and short books that double as grouchy sermons. Last year’s Enshittification is a good example: It’s about “why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it.”

He’s back with something that reads like a sequel and brings to mind the old meme about honey badgers that don’t care. Doctorow doesn’t care if the titans of AI don’t like him. He doesn’t care if his clunky, insider-trading title repels potential readers. He doesn’t care if they sit, blinking, while he expounds on the minutiae of tech. He has stuff to get off chest.

For starters, the hype surrounding AI. Doctorow sees it as driven by “growth” businesses (meaning companies like Uber and Lyft, whose worth is calculated not by their current profitability but by their forecast growth) and companies that gleefully see dollar signs in every employee they can let go. “Your boss almost certainly loves AI. Bosses will not shut up about AI,” Doctorow writes.

That’s because, according to Doctorow, there is something of a symbiotic relationship between garden-variety employers and the tech overlords, with each one feeding the other. Tech companies need hype about AI to sustain the illusion of growth, which in turn balloons their profits; once a company is no longer seen as “growing,” it becomes what is known as a “mature” company. “If you’re holding a lot of stock in a growth company, you can certainly enjoy the ride up, but you need to sleep with one eye open and one fist poised over the sell button.”

He offers Meta, circa January 2022, as an example. The company reported “less growth,” which led to a $230 billion devaluation over the next 24 hours, the largest in history. Moreover, because stock options are a large part of the compensation of tech executives, they are not just professionally but personally invested in the market’s perception that the company is growing. This is among the reasons that Doctorow believes, “Even by the standards of tech bubbles, the AI bubble is a whopper.”

The title of the book derives from the tech-bros’ use of the word “centaur,” which in Greek mythology is a creature that is half man, half horse. In the tech world (and in automation theory), a centaur is a human aided by a machine; a reverse centaur, then, according to Doctorow, is a “human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.” The “conscripted” part matters. Doctorow is no Luddite; he welcomes AI that is legitimately helpful to a human end; he has used, for example, an OpenAI technology called Whisper that can transcribe and search through downloaded audio, even though he calls the company behind Whisper “grossly overhyped and terrible.”

But there is a segment of the population who aren’t getting to choose how to use AI, but having AI foist upon them for aims that don’t sit well with Doctorow’s democratic-socialist heart. The plight of the Amazon worker comes up a lot, as does the perceived threat to the livelihood of a wide range of artists.

It’s not that the threat is entirely unsupported.

Feed a chatbot the storyline of any popular movie with a couple of key changes and it will spit out an entire screenplay in minutes. And unlike human writers, who are prone to complaining and striking and resisting changes ordered by producers and directors, the chatbot is serenely compliant. But Doctorow explains why the AI product is usually so unsatisfying: The product of any artist — from a novel to a sculpture to a symphony — is the physical representation of a “big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling” in the artist’s mind, an idea the artist wants to convey. AI, on the other hand, “has no feelings, so it has no feelings to transmit,” and that hollowness comes through in the finished product.

All that said, AI is in its infancy and will improve, and does improve, according to the complexity of prompts it is given. And Doctorow writes all this cognizant that when photography emerged there were people who said it was hollow when compared to a painting, as was the reproduction of sound when compared to a live musical performance. (He notes that the famous composer John Philip Sousa was enraged when people started recording his music and distributing it; he warned about the “menace of mechanical music” and complained to Congress, “Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day.”)

And yet the problem is not so much that AI is flawed and soulless as it is that AI is being manipulated by capitalistic cartels, Doctorow believes, and so The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is very much a socialist manifesto that may not sit well with some whose political ideology runs counter to his. But there is a strong and growing backlash to AI even among fervent capitalists, so there will be an appetite for his recommended solutions “to strike at the source of AI’s power” by raging against the AI machine and its bitter, everyday fruits, like surveillance pricing.

Doctorow is a compelling writer and one of the most interesting thinkers in the world of technology, as such, worth paying attention to as we figure out what’s happening around us, and to us, as AI proliferates. In a world of reverse centaurs, be a centaur, is his message du jour. B+

Featured Photo: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, by Cory Doctorow

(Alfred A. Knopf, 234 pages)

Richard Russo labors in the shadow of another Maine novelist who shall go unnamed. He’s the only one of the two who has won a Pulitzer Prize, which Russo was awarded in 2002 for Empire Falls, a story about people caught in the grip of an economically struggling town in Maine.

Russo’s latest, Under the Falls, has a similar theme, but with a different origin story. He began writing with the intention of its being a TV series, but the project fell apart during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, and so he recast it as a novel — lucky for us. The book, as they say, is a page turner, a sophisticated one that explores the limits and obligations of childhood friendships, and the hold that a home town can have on a person even after they leave it.

The main character, Tyler Sinclair, left his home town, Stone Mountain, when he turned 18, taking nothing with him but clothes, a guitar and a little money he’d swiped from his dad. He left behind a dysfunctional home — his father had been physically abusive to Tyler’s mother and verbally abusive to the both of them — and also a circle of close friends. When Tyler left, he didn’t say goodbye to anyone, and he didn’t respond when those friends tried to reach him later.

Eighteen years later Tyler is a celebrity, the lead singer of a band named after his home town. Some of his most famous songs are about things that had happened at Stone Mountain, including one called “The Long Fall” that is evocative of a tragedy that befell one of Tyler’s childhood friends. That friend, nicknamed Doc, became paraplegic after an accident that Tyler was involved with. Doc still lives in Stone Mountain, as does Tyler’s long-ago best friend, Curt, and as Under the Falls opens, Tyler is reluctantly headed to Stone Mountain with his band, having been booked to play a fundraising concert for Doc, without his consent or knowledge.

As unhappy as he is about going back to Stone Mountain, Tyler sees it as a one-and-done. He’ll have an uncomfortable, on-camera reunion with Doc — the band’s manager had contacted a local TV station seeking publicity for the band’s first show after the pandemic — and then play a concert at his old high school and return to his comfortable post-Stone Mountain life. Tyler’s parents have passed, so there’s no family drama to navigate, just the awkwardness of seeing former friends who had not escaped the town and did not enjoy his success.

The conversation with Doc goes better than Tyler expected — his old friend has made the most of his post-accident circumstances and is able to drive, using a tricked-out hearse modified for his use. But after the camera and lights are turned off, the conversation takes a serious turn, with the topic of blame for Doc’s accident coming up. Doc assures Tyler that he doesn’t blame him, but says not everyone in the town feels that way. And the bad feelings aren’t just about the accident, but about Tyler’s success. “It’s not just that you made all that money. It’s that you made it writing songs about us. About our lives,” Doc tells Tyler.

The sense of dread that Tyler had about returning to Stone Mountain turns out to be prescient. There’s a huge turnout for the event, and at first it’s like every other concert — an exuberant, appreciative crowd. But then there is a shocking announcement and the tone drastically changes, setting into motion a series of events that will upend Tyler’s life and those of his friends.

The trajectory is dark, and as it unfolds we vault from one perspective to another, including those of Curt, Tyler’s closest childhood friend who is now Stone Mountain’s chief of police, and Deb, a young officer whose good heart and honest questions about what happened that day threatens to unravel lives. The story moves fast and packs an emotional punch.

Tyler and the people of Stone Mountain aren’t necessarily likeable; Russo didn’t develop his characters deeply enough for us to feel comfortable picking sides. We get information about the characters’ back stories on a “need to know” basis. His decision to give one lesser character a MAGA hat and a presence at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is curious, as these details aren’t relevant to what transpires at Stone Mountain and could alienate some readers. In fact, I’m not sure that dating the story in any way was a good choice — the Covid-19 pandemic keeps coming up in this and other recent novels, in a soon-to-be wearisome way.

Russo’s latest resonates not because of its modern touchpoints and questions but because of old ones: How do dynamics change between childhood friends over time? What do we owe our friends and family members if we achieve financial success and they don’t? Is it ethical to walk away from a bad situation, leaving others in it, without explanation? And Under the Falls is an exploration of how small missteps over the course of a lifetime can lead to enormous regret. As one of Tyler’s friends muses, the circle of friends were all “good people” decades earlier, and yet what happens the day of the benefit concert, and its aftermath, suggests that at least some of them aren’t now.

“No way to uneat the apple,” Russo writes, positing a double meaning for the titular falls. Stone Mountain was never Eden, not for Tyler or for his friends, but like every small town and large city, it was a breeding ground for the best and worst of human impulses. Their struggles are our own, writ large. And the 2023 writers’ strike notwithstanding, they’d still make for a great TV series. B+

Featured Photo: Unseen, by David Lewis and Keelan Leyser.

(Bloomsbury Sigma, 273 pages)

At first glance, Unseen looks like a typical make-your-life-better book, a compilation of research distilled for a general audience by a social scientist or academic. But early on, Keelan Leyser and the late Dr. David Lewis put readers on notice that Unseen is different, given that one of the authors describes himself as “magician, mentalist and pickpocket.”

OK, we’re in.

It’s not every day one has the chance to get life advice from a pickpocket.

Thankfully, Leyser’s light-fingeredness is in the interests of social science rather than a product of criminal intent. The success of both magicians and pickpockets depends on their ability to manipulate attention.

“Whether secretly removing a watch from someone’s wrist or making a pack of cards appear to turn into a block of glass in someone’s hands, the principles remain the same: the brain’s attention can be redirected through calculated psychological triggers,” Lewis and Leyser write.

In short, both magicians and pickpockets expose our cognitive blind spots, the ways in which we go through life “looking, not seeing.” In Unseen the authors convey these lessons leaving our wallets untouched. The everyday workings of the human body, especially the eye and brain, may seem miraculous, but we are largely unconscious of the way in which its processes fail us, sometimes catastrophically.

Researchers say that human error is responsible for 70 percent of vehicle accidents and 80 percent of aviation accidents, and cognitive blind spots play as much a role in this as inattention or exhaustion. In fact, we are most likely to suffer from blind spots when we are one of the “3 Fs” — fatigued, frightened or furious, Lewis and Leyser write. Even when not noticeably impaired by one of the 3Fs, human beings make three to six errors every hour, “regardless of the task or activity being conducted,” one safety expert tells the authors.

This is because there are so many ways in which our brains can fool us, as evidenced by the famous sketch “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law,” an illusion created in 1915 by a British cartoonist. When looking at the drawing (seen as sexist by today’s standards), some people see an old and unattractive woman, whereas others see a stylish young woman. Lewis and Leyser offer dozens of other examples that similarly show how our perception is altered by the shortcuts our brains take in processing information. They not only present photos and illustrations, but also provide QR codes throughout the book that take the reader to webpages where the concept is more fully explained. It’s an interesting approach, although I’m still not sure how I feel about having to have a smartphone on hand while reading a book.

Nor am I sure whether I’m happy to have learned about how accident prone all of us are because of these blind spots.

While most people believe we have five senses, Lewis and Leyser explain there are many more than that, and the shortcuts that the brain takes are necessary because of the millions of pieces of information it is constantly bombarded with. Blind spots basically are an adaptation that allows us to maintain our sanity, and there are varieties of them. There is, for example, “change blindness” in which we can be oblivious to a difference that becomes obvious when it is pointed out to us; this is particularly worrisome when applied to the work of those reading X-rays at a hospital and screening luggage at the airport.

There is “choice blindness,” in which people fail to notice a change in a choice they have previously made, which has had disturbing repercussions for those picking out suspects in a police lineup. And there is “expectation blindness,” in which people’s expectation of an outcome or act influences how we perceive what actually happens, which has resulted in wrongful police shootings and fatal medical mistakes, as when a nurse picked up a drug syringe and read the label as she expected to see it, rather than the way it was, resulting in the death of a patient.

In a chapter on visual illusions, Lewis and Leyser lay out why we are so easily fooled by what we think we see, such as the drawing known as “Shephard’s Tables,” which seems to depict two tables of varying sizes, but does not. Things get even weirder when they take up the intra-body communication that goes on between the brain and the gut, our so-called “alien brain” run by billions of microbes, and blind spots driven by other body parts, including the bladder. (“An empty stomach reduces our decision-making powers, while a full bladder increases them,” the authors write.

Unseen also delves into the complex machinations of why we remember faces and why we find some people attractive but not others, and how marketers exploit our blind spots to sell us things. The authors recall a famous psychology experiment from 1967 in which a person dressed from head to foot in a black cloth bag went to a college class every day for a semester. The “Bag Man,” who has never been identified, was at first mocked by other students, but as time went on they became protective of him. One researcher later said that Bag Man illustrated that “people will grow to like a thing they initially detest — even with no new information — if they are repeatedly exposed to it,” which is one reason brands bombard us with familiar products repeatedly.

In addition to showing us how certain popular magic tricks work, Lewis and Leyser offer some tips on banishing, or at least finding workarounds for, our blind spots. Cutting down on the fatigue in the 3Fs is an obvious one; when we’re tired we’re more likely to succumb to them. (It’s harder to stop being frightened or furious, although they have suggestions for that as well.) Perhaps the most helpful is being aware of all this social science research and how it applies to ordinary life.

Unfortunately, the authors spend 250 pages warning us about cognitive blind spots and only 22 telling us to banish them, with some suggestions that seem banal (tart cherry juice or milk to help you sleep, yawn). More helpful would have been 20 pages of warnings, 250 pages of solutions. B

Featured Photo: Unseen, by David Lewis and Keelan Leyser.

(Little A, 413 pages)

New Hampshire native Joyce Maynard has said that she likes to write about things people don’t talk about. That can be a plus or a minus, especially in a coming-of-age story that explores uncomfortable family dynamics through the eyes of a 14-year-old on the cusp of puberty.

Literary fiction laced with suspense, In Wonderland is as sophisticated a novel as one would expect from someone who has been writing books for a half-century. Maynard knows her craft and builds tension slowly, like a tea kettle placed on low heat.

As June 1986 begins, Frances — her last name is not given — is miserable in the way all 14-year-old girls are miserable pre-social-media, with the added stress of parents who barely speak to each other or to her. Her father drinks too much, they live in a sad, dark apartment in New Jersey, and their only fun family ritual is going to visit her father’s childhood friend at his lakefront home in Maine each Labor Day.

This year, however, she gets to spend the entire summer there. Her father’s friend and his wife need a mother’s helper for the summer, and they invite Frances to fill the position, which involves little more than lightly supervising the two children (one of whom is just two years younger than Frances) and getting them to tennis lessons. Frances is thrilled just to get out of the gloomy house for the summer.

But she also has fond memories of being at the estate, named Wonderland, and her father’s friend, Forrest, is the only person in her life who treats her with respect. Even better, he is the kind of person everyone wants to be friends with — active, engaging, generous, energetic, attentive to a fault, especially to his wife, Regina, whose family’s wealth enables their lifestyle.

For Frances, Regina was a wan figure in the background on her previous trips to Wonderland. She has an unspecified medical condition that requires her to take lots of pills and lots of naps. What energy she has seems to be used up in the evening when she types instructions for everything her family needs to know and do the next day. “The thing about dealing with Regina is recognizing she’s just not a normal person,” Frances’s father tells her.

But the presence of Forrest makes up for that, and as the summer begins, Frances fits seamlessly into the family’s routines, marveling that this will be her life for a little more than three months. “It was all so beautiful,” she observes. “Outside now, a pair of loons called out to each other. Lace curtains fluttered at the window, moonlight glittering. From the other side of the lake, someone was setting off fireworks for no particular reason except that at Lake Catherine every day felt like a special occasion.”

But Forrest’s affection for Frances becomes an obsession for her, fueled by the hormones of adolescence. When Regina gives her a gift — a leather-bound journal — telling her that every girl should keep a journal, Frances starts writing about her interactions with Forrest and eventually slips from the real to the imagined. The journal, which she hides under her mattress, is a ticking time bomb throughout the novel, with all the subtlety of golden retriever. We know somebody is going to find this journal eventually; we just don’t know who or when.

Meanwhile, as Frances’s relationship with Forrest develops and changes over time, so too does her relationship with Regina, who wants to both mother the girl and also treat her as some kind of unpaid therapist. Regina begins to confide in Frances about the strengths and deficiencies of her marriage, including the couple’s sex life, not knowing that Frances is always going to be on Team Forrest. But Regina says nothing to shed light on other secrets, including her physical and mental condition, and a mysterious locked room in the house. Every story is supposed to have a villain, they say, but it’s unclear whether there is a villain here at all or just a bunch of spoiled, entitled, clueless or heartbroken people trying to play the cards they’ve been dealt.

It’s not a spoiler to say there is a pivotal death in the story since Maynard opens In Wonderland with Frances’s memory of encountering the corpse. It might be a spoiler to say I have no idea why she did this. To anyone paying close attention, the scene foreshadows a future event and diminishes the eventual shock of it.

This is not to say that there aren’t other shocks throughout the book, going right down to the final pages. The biggest surprise of all, however, is what a page-turner a novel about a 14-year-old sex-curious girl can be, even if you can do without all the cringy inner dialogue about nonexistent breasts and a menstrual cycle that refuses to start. The characters in this world may not be wholly lovable, but they are interesting, and as such, we are invested in what happens to them. Lake Catherine may be fictional, but the emotional punch Maynard delivers is real. B+

Featured Photo: In Wonderland, by Joyce Maynard.

(Restless Books, 292 pages)

Sofi Stambo was born in Bulgaria and now lives in New York, which is about all anybody seems to know about her, given that her website is down (as of this writing) and the biographical information about her on the internet is scant.

That said, we know from her debut collection of short stories that Stambo is a very good student of the human condition and, from the title of a forthcoming novel, This Train Has Sailed, that she has a fine sense of irony and a very good agent. Which makes her story collection, People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, very low-risk in terms of your time. In fact, some of the stories here — 34 in all — take less than 10 minutes to read but will stick in your memory much longer than that. Others read more like journal entries than fiction.

Take, for example, “”I Stepped on a Cat,” in which the narrator says, “I started learning English when I was six, and here I am in Brooklyn, and I am still faking it.” It’s a short and lyrical account of a child trying to learn English, “a language not a single Bulgarian villager spoke, that no one in the house understood.” As the only English speaker in the house, it fell to her to translate pirated English-language movies shown via videotape on a TV that was always breaking. As for the dialogue, “I made it all up, and as long as I kept talking simultaneously with the actors and in sentences of similar length, no one complained.”

Fast-moving and irritatingly illustrated with sketches by Yana Mihaylova that are serviceable but do nothing to improve the reader’s experience, the collection skips from interactions in diners to offices to parking lots, most set in the boroughs of New York with a rotating cast of immigrants or the children of immigrants.

In “Ponchicki for the Fine Ladies of Queens,” the narrator is envious of her coworker at the travel agency who “is constantly hungry and forever chewing on something” and who talks lovingly to her boyfriend at lunch about what they’re eating, in hearing range of the rest of the staff: “We don’t have boyfriends, we have husbands, and they don’t care what we eat for lunch, only about what they’ll get for dinner.”

The workers book their clients’ trips to exotic places even though they themselves hardly ever leave Queens. One day a vivacious visitor comes through the door, bearing a box of ponchicki, a type of pastry from Poland. “He shared his strong belief that you must never go anywhere empty-handed and should always bring food with you. It breaks language barriers, and people are generally nicer to you when you feed them.” The women are enchanted. The visitor, however, ultimately serves to highlight the dullness of their everyday existence, in the same way that their love-smitten colleague did.

In “Spying in Manhattan Diners,” a couple sit in a classic Greek diner, observing the clientele and the manager, who, as at virtually any New York diner, is the 20-something son of the owner, “a little bit on the short side, has been to the gym three or four times this week already, and is clearly a fan of the protein shake diet, which makes him brave enough to wear a tight red shirt. You can’t say for sure if it is the protein shake and/or the occasional line of coke, but he repeats everything he says. His name of course is George. It’s always George.”

The titular story, “People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much,” again plumbs the mind-numbing routine of office work, this time for three young women who look from their cubicle windows down on the Hudson River, as a cruise ship passes by at the same time every week. The narrator longs for the adventures experienced by the people on the ship while she slogs through her workday with one coworker obsessed with lucky numbers and another who insists that she has unlucky letters of the alphabet. (“Would you believe it if I told you that in the same year, I had problems with my Cat, and my Carpet, and my Ceiling? … Cat completely ruined my Carpet. The doctor said she had Cancer, are you following the trend? Not only did she die, but on Columbus Day.”)

The best short stories startle us or tickle us and often contain one or more threads that lead us back to our own lives. In “Goods,” Stambo reminds us of our own grandmothers, as the narrator follows an elderly Asian woman who looks like her deceased grandmother, in order to temporarily experience the illusion that her beloved Baba Borka is still alive. With a few succinct vignettes we see this grandmother grow older, her eyelids growing heavier “as if she carried too many memories there,” and eventually pass on, leaving to her granddaughter a handmade dress that she wears proudly until she realizes that it will cease to exist, like her grandmother, if she keeps washing it. (Stambo has a soft spot for grandmothers in general; in her acknowledgments, she says “this book is for the grandmothers who took care of us while our parents were working, who taught us the songs and poems we still know by heart. When we were bored, they read us a book.”)

Some of the stories with the best titles don’t rise to their promise: “How to Blow Your Nose in English,” for example. Conversely, the curtly named “Lists” is a delight, particularly for anyone who frequently makes shopping lists but arrives home missing several things that were critically needed but somehow didn’t make the list. (“On the bright side, we are out of bread but we have pasta. We are out of toothpaste but we are really good on toilet paper. We are actually great on toilet paper.”)

Overall, it’s an uneven collection that is charming in places; the more affection you have for New York and its eccentricities, the more charmed you will be. B

Featured Photo: People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, by Sofi Stambo

(Atria, 230 pages)

In 2021, Ann Larson published a first-person article in The New Republic, describing what it was like to work as a supermarket cashier — a challenging and low-paying job under usual circumstances, but even more so in the surreal early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Larson had gone to college in Utah and graduate school in New York, planning to work in academia before discovering how few opportunities were there. She’d helped found a group called the Debt Collective that lobbied for the abolishment of student loans. But as the pandemic hit, needing money and wanting to get out the house, Larson applied to work at a local supermarket she liked, thinking it might even be a kind of public service, under the circumstances.

It may well have been — we all needed groceries in 2020 — but the experience was grueling and dehumanizing, as Larson writes in Cleanup on Aisle Five, the nonfiction book that grew out of her essay in The New Republic.

Working long days and unpredictable schedules (sometimes she’d get home at 11 p.m. and have to be back at work at 7 the next morning), Larson writes that she turned into a “walking peanut butter sandwich” because “Being perpetually too tired to cook was one of the ironies of working at the supermarket.” Despite her struggles to complete the most complicated transactions, she was soon promoted to a supervisory role, which came with even more absurdly difficult tasks to master, and frequent opportunities for customers to take out their frustrations on Larson and her coworkers.

Their frustrations surely stemmed in part from the ubiquitousness of self-checkout stands, which have turned all of us into cashiers and made it seem like being a cashier is the easiest of jobs: scan, swipe and go.

But besides the human jobs lost to this convenience, self-checkouts come with a plethora of problems that all have to be solved by a human being (machines that refuse to print the receipt, for example) along with the myriad other unseen jobs that supermarket employees must perform. Larson describes her struggles to learn things such as resetting a broken sensor at a check-stand while angry customers verbally abuse her. (“Can someone come and help this idiot?” one man yelled as she worked to repair a machine.)

Frequently, the problems had been caused by the customers, as when they put cash into the slot marked for coupons.

Staffing is another headache that goes unseen by impatient customers; the supermarket employees call in sick for a variety of reasons (once, a worker confessed to Larson that she wasn’t sick but was too broken up by the loss of her dog to work for a few days), disrupting operations storewide, as others have to fill in. At one point, bathroom breaks have to be limited, and one worker vows to wear an adult diaper.

Larson describes a workplace where people are constantly interrupted from the work that they are doing to do other work: As one person said on an online forum, “Today, no fewer than ten shoppers asked for help while I was on the sales floor. I happily assisted them.” But when the worker returned to his regular job restocking products, he was criticized by a manager for taking too long for that primary work.

Customers can be problematic in other ways that make the lives of supermarket workers harder, as when they wait until they get to the front of the store to decide if they’re buying something, and then leave what they’ve decided not to buy — in supermarket parlance, “gobacks” — for someone else to put back. “Gobacks regenerated like bacterial spores. A worker could spend hours in the aisles and never get to the bottom of the cart,” Larson writes.

Larson weaves her day-to-day experiences, and those of her coworkers, with interesting stories of how the modern American supermarket came into being. Most people consider grocery shopping a chore, and yet the first store where shoppers “got to” pick out their groceries themselves — a store called Piggly Wiggly, in Memphis, in 1916 — was hailed as a boon for busy people, since they no longer had to wait for a store employee to gather their goods. “Every customer will be her own clerk,” one advertisement for the store said.

The Piggly Wiggly model became a trend, as we’re now seeing with self-checkout stands. These vignettes also include the story of a Massachusetts factory worker who designed the machine that gave us flat-bottomed paper bags, and the first robotic grocery store, an “endlessly glitchy” debacle called the Keedoozle, which started — and ended — in the 1940s.

Larson’s account is most sympathetic when she is talking about her coworkers, who labor in the same circumstances as she does without the hope of getting out of them by writing a book.

There is, for example, Whitney, who was making ends meet by selling plasma to supplement her income; George, the security guard who worked full-time but had never been able to save up enough money to take a vacation; a 52-year-old cashier who had been planning to celebrate her 20th wedding anniversary by driving to another state to buy lottery tickets, but then couldn’t afford the gas and so stayed home and worked in the garden instead.

Almost all seem one unexpected expense away from bankruptcy. One 25-year-old cashier needed a root canal and was in pain so bad she could only eat soft food, but she didn’t have dental insurance or the means to pay for the procedure herself, so she was on a waiting list at a local dental school where you could get treatment from students learning how to do procedures.

Some of the employees had come to the supermarket after burning out at Amazon; one person had worked in a warehouse and was required to box 90 items every minute. Not that this grocery store didn’t have quotas — at one point, cashiers were told they needed to scan at least 21 items per minute so that customers didn’t get impatient. They held a contest to encourage the cashiers to scan even faster: The winner would receive a $5 gift card to the deli.

Cleanup on Aisle Five challenges the assumption that checking out groceries is so easy that anyone can do it, and adds to a growing body of work about the indignities borne by unseen workers who make the lives of everyone else more liveable, for little pay. Simon Paré-Poupart’s new release Trash! A Garbageman’s Story does much the same.

These books may not belong on the same shelf as the working-class portraits offered by Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Harrington and George Orwell, as a blurb on the cover of Cleanup on Aisle Five says, but they offer voices often dismissed or ignored in the conversations about wealth and poverty, and I, for one, will never leave an unwanted item with a supermarket cashier again.

B

Featured Photo: Cleanup on Aisle Five, by Ann Larson