The Perennial Predicament of the Artist with an Office Job

"D__, the narrator of "The Copywriter" (Scribner), a début novel by Daniel Poppick, senses that the end is near. At the retail startup where he permalances, his supervisor confides to him that nearly the entire staff will be let go in a matter of months, but he has already been reading between the lines of the financial updates sent by the C.E.O., who is twenty-four."

""Understanding the unsaid, decoding silence," D__, a poet, writes. "It isn't poetry, but poetry has trained me for it." His employer sells "last season's kitsch status pieces, otherwise known as garbage," including an eggplant-emoji drone with a Bluetooth speaker in the tip and "an LED light box emblazoned with the phrase NAMASTE IN BED." Between the worthless products and the absurdity of gilding them in expensive advertising copy, D__ can't really argue that he deserves a paycheck."

D__ is a thirtysomething poet who works as a copywriter at a retail startup that sells kitschy, worthless products and faces imminent layoffs. He decodes corporate silences and sees the company's financial precarity while crafting gilded ad copy for trinkets. The narrative probes the tension between poetic sensitivity and the grind of commerce, and whether a reader can pursue Proust amid day-job demands. D__'s long-term relationship with Lucy stalls as both struggle to monetize cultural labor. Suburban parents, job insecurity, and absurd consumer culture frame a search for meaning and adult purpose.

Read at The New Yorker