(FORTUNE Magazine) – In 1970, Vladimir Nabokov was visited in Switzerland by Charles Givan, a graduate student from California who was going to teach creative writing. Nabokov was imperiously skeptical about the whole enterprise, and sighingly swatted away the idea that one might learn creativity. At least, he supposed, Givan's students could be taught to avoid cliche. Then he proposed another lesson: "They could learn what a dentist does--learn about different professions. That's very old-fashioned. Flaubert's idea. Learn the little secrets of a trade, of the different professions, so that they can write about them."

Old-fashioned, indeed: It is easier to find a cigarette in a Hollywood movie than it is to find detailed descriptions of trades or professions in contemporary fiction. It is not that today's fictional heroes and heroines float on the invisible carpet of "private income," that endlessly flexible tool of 19th-century writers whereby characters were miraculously freed from alienating labor so as to spend whole novels perfecting dialogue and smooth scene-changing (there's nothing like a job to retard a hero's amble from A to B). It is more that today's fictional characters have largely invisible jobs. Characters are either between jobs or anxious to leave them, despising them so comprehensively that they can hardly deign to describe them for the reader. Anyway, in much contemporary fiction--especially in the short story--detail is so scanty and the writer under such starter's orders to hurry up and finish the race that it is hardly ever necessary to do more than throw a sentence or two at us--"Martin was an accountant. He could have done worse"--and hope this will quash our curiosity.

John Updike has commented that "the details of doing business are generally left out of novels, even those involving businessmen." This inattention is curious in an age when most of us are defined by our jobs, and when most writers have had some experience of the world of work. Of course, the novel has not traditionally been very concerned with people working. Busyness, rather than business, has been the novelist's quarry--the task of moving characters about, from house to house or from town to town. The English novel's roots are in Elizabethan travelers' journals. The picaresque novel, in which a character roams freely from place to place, is the natural fruit of these roots and is still popular; it was brilliantly mimicked by Thomas Pynchon in his recent Mason & Dixon. There is probably also some kind of unconscious connection between physical and mental movement: If one needs to be free from encumbrance to travel, then one needs the same freedom to engage in mental travel. Who is ever actually employed in Dostoevsky or Woolf or Beckett?

The novel's other origin was as domestic bourgeois entertainment for, often about, and often written by, women. This meant, until well into the 20th century, that heroines were wives, adulterers, heiresses, or a combination of all three. They were not employed. Apparently little has changed, despite the obvious material developments in women's lives. In a recent New York Times Magazine article about 28 novels selected for Oprah's Book Club, D.T. Max noted that 22 were by women and that in only one book do we see a protagonist "who spends considerable time at an office job."

Nevertheless, there was a brief era when fiction dwelt seriously and acutely on work, money, and the culture of business. This was during the blaze of industrialization in Europe and America that flamed between the 1880s and the 1930s. Curiously enough, the greatest portraits of what Thomas Carlyle called "the cash-nexus" grew out of a generalized literary hostility to business, one that is still with us today. Writers like William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and even Sinclair Lewis believed that corporate and industrial America ground its employees into mere digits or corrupted their innocence with dreams of avarice. They saw humans as the playthings of gigantic capitalist forces beyond their control. They were influenced, of course, by the Romantic poets and by Dickens, and in some respects were simply extending the mid-Victorian depiction of the poor clerk (such as Melville's Bartleby or Gogol's Akaky Akakievich in "The Overcoat") and the poor maid (Flaubert's "A Simple Heart")--the oppressed and put-upon subordinate. In Sister Carrie, Carrie is really a version of the Victorian maid or clerk, sent out into a world made more complicated and threatening thanks to industrialization. Few readers forget Carrie's first sight of Chicago, with its new buildings and its department stores, and her horrible job at Spiegelheim & Co., makers of boys' caps, where "the whole atmosphere was one of hard contract."

It is business, and the social ambition powered by money, that corrupt Silas Lapham, the paint manufacturer, in Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham, published in 1885. Even in Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (1922), supposedly more sympathetic to Main Street, it is necessary for Babbitt to leave the homogenized industrial city of Zenith that he so adores and make for the purer air of the countryside in order to be morally renewed. The business culture clamps and stifles the individual: From Henry Adams (who warned of the horrors of the approaching modern "multiverse" in his Education) to H.G. Wells in Tono-Bungay (a wonderful novel about a huge commercial empire, built on a quack medicine, that eventually collapses) to E.M. Forster in Howards End (it is the old rural house of the book's title that clearly deserves to last, not the capitalist Mr. Wilcox) to F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, the modern culture of business, finance, and industrialization is feared as the mistral of the moment, the wind that will sweep away value and replace it with cost.

Yet this was also a kind of golden--or perhaps brass--age in fiction, in which, from the bristles of their hostility, such writers produced superb brushstroke portraits, full of sympathy and satire, of people caught at work. Dreiser is probably the supreme example, a great negative sensualist of money, always making us feel, through his dreaming characters, the hideously transfixing texture of the dollar bill. So dragging was the pull of modern American industrialization that foreign writers came to set their novels in it, most famously the great French nihilist Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who in his novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) sends his hero, Bardamu, to New York, where he wanders through Wall Street, watches commuters going to bed and rising--"bloated molluscs, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience"--and eventually gets a vile job on the floor of a Ford factory.

But since the Second World War, contemporary fiction has been oddly uninterested in how people earn a living. One reason for this is doubtless that hostility was a spur and that today's novelists have exchanged the spur of hostility for the saddle of indifferent disdain. Money, the cash-nexus, is not a threat to writers--not because it is without that savage, voiding power feared by their ancestors, but because it is no longer clear what value, what nobility, would be threatened. In a nonhierarchical world we are all suspect now, all in the same pool and all a little fishy.

Doubtless, too, most contemporary writers, after a century of industrialization, can see, as their predecessors could do only hazily, that the pace of economic and material change is so swift that to risk a detailed evocation of a working environment is to risk producing an obsolescence. Tom Wolfe, that chronicler of modern excess, might be a cautionary case here. His two novels of the '80s and '90s, Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, respectively, are tied to their rapidly absconding decades like an identity tag to a parolee. Who will reread these books? In time they will be of interest only to sociologists.

But there is a deeper obstacle that has to do with the way work has changed. In ways that would be incomprehensible to Dickens or Dreiser or even perhaps Fitzgerald, work has become universal. We all work, and most of us, including novelists, do essentially the same kind of work: We gape at screens. Physically speaking, there is no difference between the travel agent and the writer. Both are bombarded with rays, make the tiny patter of rats' feet on their keyboards, and break for lunch. Yet work has also become much more specialized, so that the accountant and the architect, the lawyer and the Microsoft employee, though they replicate each other physically, could not exchange jobs. Each performs a local task, unknowable to anyone outside the tribe. Work has become at once boringly familiar and strangely obscure, at once universal and closed; it is a kind of open prison.

This poses a new difficulty for the novelist, who wants to write about people who do identifiable and even universal (but not boring) things and who wants to avoid spending a whole novel explicating the intricacies of a specialism. There is nothing more ephemeral than the documentary-style novel that promises to "bring us the news" on the world of the law, or the world of medicine, or whatever. In the 1950s Norman Mailer was able to write a novel about the closed world of Hollywood, The Deer Park, because filmmaking was less specialized than it now is. (Though it's still a little bit dull.) Compare Mailer's success with Douglas Coupland's recent novel, Microserfs, about the lives of several employees at a Microsoft-style office. It is a slog to read, because it is a tediously limited fictional world--it is precisely as limited as being at work, in fact, and the reader longs to put on a jacket and go home. Significantly, the first chapter of Microserfs appeared in Wired--specialist fiction for a specialist audience.

So the problem with work as currently practiced is that, as a literary subject, it plays havoc with the novelist's need to balance the universal and the particular: Contemporary work is too universal and too particular at the same time. This is why film has so smoothly stepped in to perform the documentary function. Film is continually showing us closed worlds--sports, police, submarines, ambulance drivers, gamblers, factories--because film doesn't have to display data in the same way. Through foreground and background, a single screen shot can show us the equivalent of many pages of description. Richard Powers' recent novel, Gain, for instance, is a very ambitious, finely intelligent novel about the rise of Clare International, a soap manufacturer that over decades becomes a multinational chemical corporation. The book is a distinguished modern version of Wells' Tono-Bungay, but unlike its precursor it is somewhat bloated with data, with pages of description of the manufacture and marketing of soap. Film could brush this task off in a few minutes of carefully edited scenes.

The other big change in how we work is that we are now alienated from the means of production. Most of us no longer make things, and yet it is always exciting to read about, or watch, people making and completing things. For those earlier novelists, the fact that people did things was sometimes magnificent and sometimes horrifying. For many of them, as they saw it, the victims were the means of production, the objectified machines of capitalism: When Carrie applies for a job, the manager looks her over "as one would a package."

There is something vivid in this, since the novelist's task is then to disinter the human from the pile of machinery that has encrusted him, to show the suffering human. But nowadays we are ghosts, and the connections we have to making things are spectral; things are made, things arrive, in the night while we sleep. Unsurprisingly, American fiction has responded to this state of affairs by itself becoming somewhat spectral. In the absence of real connection between each other and between ourselves and our jobs, several major novelists have insisted on underground connections, on invisible linkages that may be revealed, in paranoid fashion, to be conspiracies. Thomas Pynchon is the master of this analysis, and as long ago as 1966 wrote, in The Crying of Lot 49, in praise of the invisible technologies of communication that connect us, "the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication...the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages." Don DeLillo's Underworld proves him a superb disciple of Pynchon's. In Underworld, DeLillo uses waste--garbage disposal and its technology--as a kind of symbol of the hidden or repressed connections that secretly bind us together. One of his characters, Brian Glassic, works for a company called Waste Containment. In one scene he stands before the huge landfill on Staten Island: "To understand all this. To penetrate the secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers...a unique cultural deposit...and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and eroded object of desire."

DeLillo captures the sense of a whole area of work as closed and secretive, and in this sense authentically modern (and paranoid-sinister to boot). But DeLillo is also an old-fashioned novelist, in that capitalism is to him a pulsing mystery, a web of impersonal malign forces, much as the old naturalists such as Dreiser and Frank Norris saw it. The difference is that the old naturalists always saw a human being at the heart of the web, trapped and wriggling; DeLillo sees, with marvelous acuity, only the web itself. That is a new-fashioned difference.