Books about difficult white collar jobs?

Does anyone know any books about characters who struggle at white collar jobs?

Usually when I see books or movies about lawyers, they show the main characters going through their work without a scratch. They make it look like if you’re smart enough then the profession will be a breeze. However, the reality is that being an attorney, a doctor, or politician is brutal work. I don’t often see a story about an attorney who gets brutalized by his profession and struggles to find a way to keep his sanity.

A good example of what I’m looking for is All the King’s Men, which is about politics.

Know any others?

Fight Club.

There are hardly any novels about people just doing their jobs, unless their job is doctor or homicide detective. (Well, Arthur Hailey’s novels from the sixties and seventies, but those are getting pretty old.)

If the protagonist’s day job is anything else, there has to be a murder thrown in to “add drama”.

There has to be a few good ones right?

I’m watching House of Cards right now and the entire show is mostly about the majority whip doing his job in Congress.

A Civil Action, a 1996 non-fiction book that became a movie in 1998. The story follows attorney Jan Schlichtmann as he pursues a case against two large companies (Beatrice and W.R. Grace) for illegal dumping, which ended up tainting groundwater, which caused an unusually-large number of local children to develop leukemia. The book details Schlichtmann’s struggles as he spends more and more investigating and litigating the case, eventually having to sell his condo and car, living in the office, and filing bankruptcy. As I recall from the book, Schlichtmann’s earnings from the case eventually came to about $30,000 per year.

The Pale King, David Foster Wallace. One of the main themes is how hard it is to do really boring work, in this case, processing tax forms.

I don’t know if it fits the O.P.s criteria for struggling, but Paul Erdmann wrote some excellent novels about bank manipulation etc, called The Silver Bears, The Billion Dollar Killing, and the Crash of '79.

Though dated now they were bloody good reads, and based on his own experience, having started a Swiss Bank himself and being jailed for fraud.

Two of my favorite books of all time are what I call “white collar true crime”: The Informant and Conspiracy of Fools both by Kurt Eichenwald. The former was made into a passable movie, but the book is much better.

There are lots of medical memoirs like The House of God about the struggle to be a doctor.

One of my favorite books, dot.bomb is about a communications manager (which just happens to be my job) at an internet startup. Lots of detail about the daily struggles.

If you want books about people struggling to commit white collar crime, I have read hundreds and could give you a complete list of my favorites (including Conspiracy of Fools).

Barbarians At The Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco was a fantastic book and a fantastic made-for-TV movie.

Aren’t many of the John Grisham books about how hard it is to be a lawyer? I haven’t read most of them but I did read The Firm and that was a major theme.

Fear and Trembling by Amelie Nothomb. A Belgian woman working at a Japanese Corporation. I’m reading it now, good so far.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, is about engineers designing a new computer. It was written in 1981 so the details are history now, but the story of engineering compromises and corporate in-fighting should still be interesting.

Well…sort of. Grisham’s books are about how hard it is to be a fictional lawyer created by an author that can’t write a decent ending. The truth is that real life lawyers aren’t nearly as exciting as fictional ones. I’ve practiced for 18 years now and I’ve never been in a high speed chase, or had contract killers chasing me, or had hot women seducing me with cocaine.

Maybe you aren’t doing it right.
To the OP: would 1984 count?

No for the same reason that John Grisham doesn’t count. The struggles in the story should be something that real white collar workers can relate to. Doing your job while running away from an oppressive government isn’t something a normal government official struggles with (at least not yet).

Two films by Mike Judge come to mind; Office Space and Extract.

In the former, IT workers are finding it difficult to deal with their managers
In the later, managers are finding it difficult to deal with labour.

Dot Bomb is a fascinating look at the account of one dot.com’s ‘rise’ and fall during the late nineties. I think the concept of the company was actually pretty good, but failed due to miserable execution and being blindsided by developments. Kuo had an impossible task though.

I rank this as one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read. Kidder does an awesome job of detailing the personalities of the people involved and follows the whole project through from beginning to end. I highly recommend this one.

Michael Frayn is now better known as a playwright (for *Noises Off *and Copenhagen, among others), but he also wrote some novels centering on white-collar work. Two I’ve read and liked: Toward the End of the Morning (about journalists) and The Tin Men (about researchers).