Painful Repetition: Service Work and The Rise of the Restaurant Novel

Since the 1970s, the composition of the working class in the United States has changed dramatically. Service work now dominates the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that 81 percent of all U.S. employment by 2026 will be in services. While the service work sector includes jobs with a wide range of educational attainment, training, perceived prestige, and remuneration, most of the new jobs are non-unionized, have little potential for productivity- or wage-growth, and are resistant to automation.1The typical worker in these positions works part-time in one or more jobs for low wages, often under degraded conditions, and without benefits. Disproportionately staffed by women and people of color, these jobs are in retail, home healthcare, hospitality, food service, and other jobs not seen as "real" work. Service workers pushed into this ever-expanding category comprise a massive, but fragmented proletariat.2

Since its eighteenth century rise, the novel has responded to shifts in the organization of labor.3 Writing in 2001, Laura Hapke noted that the lives of American workers "have been chronicled by American writers of every stripe, from politically insurgent to the genteelly traditional, for over 150 years." A "mass of works" that are largely forgotten, these chronicles include the "men, women, and children of the industrial, manual, and migrant workforce as well as to non-industrial, low-level sales, clerical, and service workers."4 In the final chapters of her comprehensive study of the "Worker in American Fiction," Hapke gestures toward the final group, noting that "the service sector [has become] a site from which to probe the intersection between self and work."5 However, the service sector Hapke alludes to is largely contained to "nine-to-five figures like postal workers and repairmen" typified by the writing of Raymond Carver, Russell Banks, and Charles Bukowski.6 Perhaps closest to the novels I examine here, Hapke mentions Agnes Rossi's The Quick: A Novella and Stories (1996), which represents (white) women's labor "set neither in the sweatshop nor under the glass ceiling, but in the various landscapes of the 75 percent of all workingwomen who make under $25,000 a year where the secret griefs of the overqualified are played out."7 While writers including Rossi have represented waged service work over the last thirty years, more recent service work novels have made a particularly ubiquitous aspect of service work culturally legible: restaurant novels.8

Novels set in upscale restaurants are particularly incisive in revealing the repetitive pleasures and pains of labor common to many forms of interactive service work. However, in their emphasis on individual pain, they implicitly caution against the collective demands of workers in other service sectors now representing themselves politically through organization and direct action. I begin my analysis by describing the working day in interactive service industries, focusing in particular on full-service restaurant work.9 I then discuss repetition as a central representational problem in the labor novel in general and in the service work novel more particularly. I read two recent novels set in high-end restaurants: Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter (2016), which depicts a year in the life of a young back-waiter at a popular Manhattan restaurant, and Merritt Tierce's Love Me Back (2014), which follows the career of a server from chain restaurants to an expensive steakhouse in Dallas, Texas. I focus on the formal strategies that these novelists have developed to represent the routine, speed, and alienation that characterize restaurant work. My analysis concludes by assessing the temporal lag of the literary representation of service industry work, why that painfully repetitive work becomes legible through novels set in upscale restaurants, and the relationship between the service work novel and the growing political representation of service workers more generally.

The Service-Working Day

For many people, the restaurant is a familiar site of service work. Although most cannot afford a multi-course dinner at a three-star restaurant, the spectrum of price points from fast food dollar menus and up means that the restaurant industry is able to attract a wider swath of customers than most other service industries. But if restaurants have become a part of everyday life in the U.S., most consumers do not stop to consider service.10 As work has intensified in the U.S., the average individual works longer hours than the previous generation, which means that more workers — including, and perhaps especially, those in the restaurant industry — eat at home less and rely instead on restaurant workers to prepare and serve more of their meals. With the rise of food media and television, celebrity chefs, and the increased attention paid to food-ways and non-industrialized farming, restaurant eating seems ubiquitous. And because of the convenience of restaurants for the overworked, as well as the introduction of new business models (notably, the recent boom in fast casual restaurants), the food service industry continues to expand. This expansion relies in no small part on the access to a vast reserve army of cheapened labor.

Marxist feminists including Silvia Federici, Selma James, and Leopoldina Fortunati, have argued that service is not understood to be "real" work due to its prehistory in unpaid, racialized, and gendered socially reproductive labor.11 Federici, for example, argues that "the devaluation of reproductive work has been one of the pillars of capital accumulation and the capitalistic exploitation of women's labor."12 She suggests that because many women "in the labor market [...] are concentrated in service-sector jobs involving reproductive labor, it could be argued that they have traded off unpaid housework for their families for paid housework in the marketplace."13 In fact, the job growth in the lower end of the service industries results from a general "outsourcing" of traditionally unpaid housework. Because of their emergence from a gendered division of labor, service jobs, whether waged or tipped, have not historically been understood in terms of production, but reproduction. However, as Leopoldina Fortunati argues, "the real difference between production and reproduction is not that of value/non-value, but that while production both is and appears as the creation of value, reproduction is the creation of value but appears otherwise."14 When unwaged housework is formally subsumed into a seemingly endless variety of waged service jobs, it produces value for capital, but seems to retain its appearance of non-value. Because of this appearance, if service is seen as work at all, it is understood to be unskilled and subject to a lower wage.15

The restaurant industry provides a site from which to examine the interconnections among "unskilled," undervalued, and underpaid work. Restaurant wages have been held artificially low for decades, in part because these jobs traditionally have been understood as temporary and supplemental income for younger people on their way to other careers.16 However, the upward mobility assumed by this logic no longer materializes for many workers, regardless of educational attainment. Restaurant work is long term for many workers (even if intra-industry turnover can be high) and it is a primary source of income for many adults and their dependents.17 These jobs involve a variety of skills that many workers enjoy performing and find fulfilling, despite the toll of performing the work.18 Different segments of the restaurant industry (not to mention the hierarchy of jobs within restaurants) are gendered and racialized in ways that lead to vastly different work experiences and pay. At the high end of the restaurant industry, there are trained career professionals with a good deal of expertise and relatively high incomes. Chefs, managers, bartenders, and fine dining servers, "are the only restaurant workers in the United States who generally do earn a living wage."19 Despite the gendered and racialized origins of the work, white men tend to staff these relatively more prestigious positions.

Women and people of color, who comprise the majority of restaurant workers, are more likely to work less prestigious, lower-paid jobs in high-end restaurants in both front- and back-of-house, as well as in lower-end segments of the restaurant industry, including fast food.20 These jobs are often degraded, characterized by "the combination of low wages, poor working conditions, and frequent employer violations of labor laws."21 While sexual harassment is endemic to work under the capitalist mode of production, "[m]ore sexual harassment claims in the U.S. are filed in the restaurant industry than in any other, where as many as 90% of women and 70% of men reportedly experience some form of sexual harassment."22 This harassment may come from coworkers, managers, or owners — as evidenced by recent #MeToo scandals involving prominent restaurateurs across the country — but also from customers, who have an outsized control over interactive service due to servers' reliance on tips.23

Restaurant industry work can involve poor working conditions, seasonal pay differentials, and even wage theft. While tips in some segments of the restaurant industry are quite lucrative, the industry's reliance on a tipped sub-minimum wage is designed to shift employer risk onto employees. Non-standard, just-in-time, or inconsistent scheduling, in addition to the common practice of making workers cover their own shifts rather than being able to call out of work, can make it difficult for workers to care for themselves, their families and friends, and to otherwise plan their time. While many restaurants offer perks to employees including free or discounted food and drink, most non-management restaurant jobs lack the benefits of the "standard" labor contract including, but not limited to paid time off, health insurance, or retirement plans.24 Depending on the restaurant, shifts may be as little as a few hours, but are likely eight hours or more. Working a double (a lunch or brunch shift followed by a dinner shift in the same working day) or working a closing night shift followed by an opening shift the next morning is not uncommon in many segments of the industry. While some restaurants have set schedules for employees, many do not, and schedules may be released less than a day in advance of a new workweek. In some segments, especially in chain restaurants, part-time schedules are managed carefully by managers to avoid paying overtime.

The working day of front-of-house restaurant workers involves a variety of physical, mental, and interpersonal duties. Work ranges from boring and tedious during set up or a slow day to harried and frantic at the height of a dinner rush. Upon arriving at work, servers begin doing side work, a blanket term which encompasses all non-customer interactive tasks before, after, or during the shift. This may include setting up or tearing down one's section; sweeping; stocking ice, beverages, glassware, and dry goods such as straws, napkins, towels; wiping and setting tables; various types of cleaning from dusting to bathrooms; and rolling flatware. Before the doors open, employees memorize menu changes, specials, preparations, and other information at formal or informal pre-shift staff meetings. At some restaurants, staff may eat a "family meal" together (there may not be another chance to eat until after the shift ends several hours later). Much of this work is either in preparation for that day's shift or the next. In other words, side work is reproductive work that enables the worker's ability to perform public-facing interactive service. This portion of the working day is both hidden from the consumer and untipped, which means that during this time workers generally make sub-minimum wage; the so-called tip credit is meant to bring the worker's average hourly wage up to the regular minimum, either through tipped income made later in the shift or workweek, or failing that, by being topped up to minimum wage by the employer (although the latter is difficult to enforce).

After opening side work, the interactive service component of the shift begins. The work of interactive service relies on what Arlie Hochschild terms emotional labor, or "the management of feeling."25 Workers manage the feelings they convey while simultaneously performing repetitive tasks of physical and mental labor. Some routines may be enforced, but others are developed through experience and emulation of co-workers on the job.26 Repetition and routine mitigate the unpredictability of interactive service work by providing structure to those aspects of the job that can be routinized. And yet, the degree of routinization achieved in industrial labor does not obtain in service work because of the unpredictability of the human interaction involved. This is why many service jobs have little potential for productivity growth or automation.27 Indeed, in a service-based economy, it is not routine, but coerced flexibility that beleaguers workers.28 While not as desirable as autonomy, the repetition of routine provides a modicum of stability in which to ground a life. Yet this stability comes with the costs of physical, mental, and commoditized reproductive labor.

The work of service is more physically taxing than might be expected. Workers move constantly for the duration of the service, which may involve going up and down stairs or moving between inside and outside sections. The work involves bending, reaching, leaning, and carrying objects by turns heavy, delicate, and breakable. Service is fast-paced. The tipped wage system incentivizes speed, whether it manifests as working as large of a section as possible, especially in segments that value customer volume over quality of service, or trying to "turn" tables as quickly as possible to serve more paying customers. In more formal dining settings, staff will take pains to hide this speed from the customer, who is supposed to remain blithely unaware of the frantic energy required to provide a pleasant service for multiple tables simultaneously.

Because much of the work relies on human interaction, the content of the service shift is different from day to day and table to table. It requires skills including memorization, multitasking, and the ability to triage and anticipate the needs of tables at different stages of dining. These skills must be executed in spite of interruptions, including requests from customers (sometimes seated in other sections). Because they interact with customers who have varying needs and expectations, workers are forced to adjust for the customer who participates in the interaction, and the production of service, whether consciously or not. The interactive portion of the shift is a series of physical and conversational repetitions in which a server relies on a script to engage with customers, but also on improvisation as customers speed up, slow down, or otherwise influence the interaction based on the level of attention, explanation, and personal interaction demanded. The server's script encompasses the order and timing of the service in addition to the verbal interaction.

Service work is not only interactive, but also performative. As Rodrigo Nunes argues, it relies on the iterability of a service script:

[E]ven if the affect it produces is immeasurable, that is, non-scarce and productive of new social relations, it remains a fact for the waitress that the performance that produces the affect will have to be repeated anew every time a customer or group of customers walks into the restaurant. The performance is therefore scarce — the attention given to one table detracts from the attention given to others; it requires the physical presence of the worker and the (always varied and variable) repetition of a certain sequence of acts.29

Even so, service metes out attention and affect such that each customer believes they are the center of it. If the server is unable to produce the diner's desired effect, the performance ultimately fails. Interactive service work compels customers to perform according to the script while believing that they are in control of the interaction. The relationship of repetitious form to unpredictable content — the service routine versus the need to improvise based on the unpredictable nature of a customer's reaction — makes interactive service distinctive from other types of work. This unpredictable, human-based quality within the repetition is a primary difference that separates interactive service work from industrial or agricultural labor. The representation of this quality is also what distinguishes the service work novel from other kinds of labor novel.

Service Work and the Labor Novel

When writing for readers expecting dramatic narrative excitement and tension, the most significant problem of the literary representation of labor is its inherently repetitive nature. Nicholas Bromell argues that work "is difficult to represent also because ... it is difficult to include inside narrative because it is a subordination to, not a mastery of, time."30 Elaine Scarry suggests that this difficulty arises primarily because "work is action rather than a discrete action; it has no identifiable beginning or end; if it were an exceptional action, or even 'an action,' it could — like the acts in epic, heroic, or military literature — be easily accommodated in narrative. It is the essential nature of work to be perpetual, repetitive, habitual."31 In other words, there is no way to divide the process of work into separate parts without fundamentally misrepresenting its essence.

Rather than the manipulation of the land, machines, information, or symbols, the service work novel represents the unpredictable quality of discrete interactions between customer and worker embedded within the larger action of work. Indeed, what distinguishes the contemporary service work novel from other types of labor novels is the interpersonal and interactive nature of the work. Despite these differences, however, the service work novel has much in common with prior working-class novels in both the naturalist and realist traditions, neither of which alone "is an accurate, objective record of social conditions."32 Like its naturalist predecessors, the service work novel "faithfully depict[s] the living conditions, working experiences, and psychological tensions of the working class under capitalism."33 Most often narrated in first (or close third) person, service work novels sometimes use direct address to interpellate the reader into the performance of service, but rarely for an extended amount of the narration. The novel is often didactic, and the procedure and experience of the work are explored in thick, almost ethnographic description. This didacticism details the minutiae of the work process, addresses the conditions particular to the type of labor it represents, and establishes the expertise of the working-class characters (as well as the author, who may not be of the working class).34 The service work novel seems to differ from the naturalist novel in its depiction of the pleasures that inhere in the work despite potentially degraded working conditions.

Because the labor process is at least partly conversational, performative, and interactive, and the product of a successful service interaction is pleasure or satisfaction, interactive service work seems less resistant to representation than other types of repetitive labor even as its representation has lagged behind the growth of the service industry. Contrast, for instance, Carolyn Lesjak's reevaluation of pleasure and labor in the realist industrial novel. Lesjak argues that "the Victorian novel works to make labor invisible by producing aesthetic and domestic pleasures that distract from the issues of labor." But in the interactive service novel, labor is directly represented precisely because the pleasure involved in it does not detach from labor, but is inherent in its production.35 The contemporary interactive service work novel produces aesthetic pleasures that make visible the labor involved in creating pleasure. The service work novels that seem to make the largest impact in the literary field are those set in industries that involve interactions with customers rather than those that provide a service that does not require the presence or active participation of a customer.36 The closer the service worker is in perceived status to the employer, the more likely he or she (and it is usually she) is to be represented in fiction. This is, in part, why there is a good deal of contemporary fiction about nannies and caregivers, but comparatively little about cleaning service workers or hotel maids, even though both groups are understood to be domestic workers.37 Similarly, while fast-food work — which is interactive, but not full-service or tip-based — is particularly underrepresented in fiction about restaurant work, novels set in the high end of the industry are beginning to garner attention.38

Even before the publication of Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler made a splash in the literary world and beyond as a result of a New York Times feature, "And Our Fiction Special Tonight Is ...: Waitress Is One of Many New Writers With Big Book Deals." Although somewhat mischaracterizing the author as a "waitress" in the headline —Danler has restaurant management experience and had returned to serving while earning her MFA at The New School — the article noted that "Ms. Danler's deal is the latest in a string of splashy book contracts for debut novelists, a sign that publishers are once again willing to make big bets on unknown writers, after years of waning book advances."39 The article details how Danler, then working at the West Village French bistro Buvette, gave her manuscript to a regular customer, who happened to be Penguin Random House editor-at-large, Peter Gether. However, Danler has since disputed the neatness of this account, noting that she had meetings with 11 publishing houses and that Gether was already familiar with the manuscript via her agent. Danler received a high-six-figure deal for two books and Sweetbitter received a major media push from Alfred A. Knopf, including an excerpt in Bon Appetit and a lengthy book tour, fueled in part by a glowing New York Times review from award-winning chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton. (A television adaptation of the bestselling novel, also helmed by Danler, debuted on the Starz network on May 6, 2018, to lackluster reviews.)

If Merritt Tierce lacked this degree of hype in the popular media, she nonetheless earned serious critical notice and institutional attention. Her debut, Love Me Back, received enviable reviews, made several year-end lists, and garnered multiple awards (including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for debut fiction). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Tierce received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award in 2011 and a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" author in 2013, both prior to the novel's publication. Tierce spent over a decade in the restaurant industry, including working at Nick and Sam's, a high-end steakhouse in Dallas, TX, which shares similarities with the unnamed restaurant in her novel.40 Before becoming a staff-writer on the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black, Tierce published an essay in Marie Claire about the struggles of trying to make a living as a writer, which detailed a short stint as a mail-carrier for the U.S. Postal Service.41 That both novelists have found work in television would seem to further distinguish them from previous careers in restaurant work culturally, if not necessarily economically.

Appearing two years apart, Danler and Tierce's novels take pains to represent the working day of service described above, but they are strikingly different in style and tone. Sweetbitter is a middlebrow bildungsroman narrated by Tess, who drives to New York City with little industry experience and miraculously lands a job at a top restaurant (a thinly veiled version of Union Square Café, where Danler once worked). In addition to describing her first year in the industry, the novel balances Tess's experience of work with descriptive food writing. Love Me Back, more often bitter than sweet, follows Marie into a sequence of jobs in the restaurant industry. The novel is a knowing and at times harrowing portrayal of motherhood, alcohol and drug abuse, bad sex, and self-harm. Despite their tonal differences, both novels depict the pleasures and the harsh realities of service: the physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion of the repetitive work, as well as the excesses that accompany work built around producing and sating desire in customers.

Both Sweetbitter and Love Me Back are set in upscale restaurants, although the early chapters of the latter represent entry-level work at casual chain restaurants. The novels' narrators are unique positions in the industry: they make significantly more money in tipped income than other restaurant workers but experience similar alienation. While their incomes and sensibilities seem more indicative of the middle class, they view their work otherwise. It is from this vantage point — the in-between space of an increasingly proletarianized middle class — that their fictions represent restaurant work.42 While the settings are not typical of the average restaurant, the performance of waiting in these novels sheds light on the repetitions of the service working day.

Painful Repetition

The representation of repetitive restaurant work emphasizes the production of pleasure and desire specific to interactive service work. Howard, the self-serious general manager of the restaurant in Sweetbitter, instructs Tess that restaurant service is "a case of mismatched desires":

The restaurant, an entity separate from us, but composed of us, has a set of desires, which we call service. What is service? [...] It's order. Service is a structure that controls chaos. But the guests, the servers, have desires as well. Unfortunately we want to disrupt that order. We produce chaos, through our randomness, through our unpredictability.43

In this grandiloquent description, Howard suggests that service is a system that orders the conflicting desires of the business, the workers, and the customers. However, because the service work happens at this juncture of competing and unpredictable desires of servers and "guests," it has a tendency to break down. Howard uses the first-person plural to equate his desires with Tess's, which obfuscates his function as a manager. By implying his goals are the same as the workers, he can argue that the goal of service is a rather benign imposition of order rather than the extraction of value from the management of feeling.

In order to cope with the physical, mental, and emotional demands of the work, servers rely on routines, some of which are imposed by management and others that workers develop themselves. Tess describes a series of recurring dreams of someone yelling "Pick up!" — the food expeditor's signal that food is ready at "the pass" to be run to a table. "The dreams," Tess complains, "were tidal, consumptive, chaotic. Service played over in my head" (S 42). Howard suggests: "It's compulsive but we actually find the painful repetition pleasurable" (S 41). When Tess questions this response, Howard continues:

"It's how we self-soothe. How we maintain the illusion that we are in control of our lives. For example, you repeat 'Pick up' in hopes that the outcome each time will be different. And you are repeatedly embarrassed, are you not?" He waited for me to respond but I wouldn't meet his eyes. "You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It's our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure" (S 208-9).

According to Howard, simultaneous pleasure and pain characterizes service work.44 This characterization is consistent with the findings of the sociological literature: as noted earlier, despite the negative aspects of the job, many restaurant workers also enjoy the work they do.45 The work routine is meant to limit exposure to the pain and embarrassment of service, but the painful repetition itself can become a perverse source of pleasure for service workers. Pleasure and pain becomes intimately intertwined in service, a mixed affect registered in the titles of both novels. The title Sweetbitter, for example, registers painful repetition as "a mark of how you deal with the world [...] the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet" (S 17). Meanwhile, Love Me Back is an imperative, but because it comes from a position of wanting its affect returned by another, its demand cannot be enforced. The server's management of affect solicits an affect in the diner, but the diner's affect is ultimately beyond the server's control.

The restaurant novel formalizes this repetition of pain and pleasure. It mimetically reproduces the repetitive form and unpredictable content of interactive service work. We might think of it as a variation on Sianne Ngai's theorization of the zany as the aesthetic category representative of overworked, "post-Fordist" affective laborers. While related as a mixed-affect "aesthetic of action pushed to strenuous and even precarious extremes," the restaurant novels I read here differ slightly from the aesthetic that Ngai identifies, relying on painful pleasure rather than unfunny fun.46 This aesthetic divergence from the zany may be a product of the difference in media. For Ngai, Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy (1951-1957) and Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy (1996) typify the zany; both roles contrast the comically overwhelmed character with the masterful television or film performer inhabiting a series of different, temporary roles. In restaurant fiction, as in restaurant work, characters must "play" themselves in their performance.47

The difference between the zany and the painful repetition of the restaurant novel also responds to different characteristics of the service sector. If the zany character is an itinerant, temporary, jack-of-all-trades who performs an "unremitting succession of activities" (the contemporary precarious gig-worker) or a personified "access point" trying and failing to solve their patron's relationship to a large abstract system (the cognitive or creative worker), the restaurant worker faces a different set of challenges and seems to require a different aesthetic strategy.48 Restaurant work in these novels is not degraded because it is a series of short-term gigs or a mediation between customers and abstract systems. Although their work is tipped, which means their pay is not reliable, the restaurant workers represented in these fictions are not itinerant or struggling to cobble together different kinds of work; they are stuck in a loop of physical, emotional, and mental repetition of the same tasks varied only by the unpredictability of the service interaction. The restaurant novel thus seems to emphasize a slightly different set of issues and to rely on a slightly different aesthetic than the segments of service work so masterfully described by Ngai.

The aesthetic of the restaurant novel registers the service interaction through repetition and episodic form. This repetition comes in many forms and durations. While some service work novels confine repetition to one shift, Sweetbitter and Love Me Back show a pattern of painful repetition over the course of a year and a career, respectively. Each episode depicting restaurant work in fiction is largely exchangeable with any other and their ordering is often arbitrary in terms of character development. Aside from early training scenes in both novels, the representation of service is not teleological. Instead, the representation of service circles, holds, and repeats.49 Restaurant time is always the present and each service interaction is simultaneously new and familiar. The restaurant novel tends to alternate between work and non-work episodes rather than develop a typical narrative arc.50

Sweetbitter suggests that the service working day has "severe brackets around it. Within those brackets nothing else existed. Outside of them, all you could remember was the blur of a momentary madness" (S 3). Tess understands her work as a parenthesis — an aside in life. Within the brackets work is intensely focused and stressful, but the memory of service is inaccessible outside of it. Periods of routine work escalate into frantic mental, physical, and emotional activity (what servers call being "in the weeds," a form of sensory overload in which one has too many tasks to complete in too little time). Tess describes the severely bracketed time of service in terms of a traumatic event. Similarly, Love Me Back thematizes service as a period of overwhelming, unretrievable time. On day one of her first job at an Olive Garden as a teenager, Marie learns from her co-worker that "[t]here's [sic] only two times in a restaurant: before and after. You walk in, you white-knuckle it, try not to fuck up till it's over and then it's over. You made money or you didn't" (LMB 14). Just as Tess suggests, the undifferentiated present between the before and after is a frantic blur. Even as a seasoned hand, this white-knuckled feeling surfaces. Marie describes a "pop," when the restaurant is at its busiest, as "what would be the sixth or seventh second of a bull ride, time to hold on tight to that shift or give up, fall off." She continues:

I had a station far from provisions so every time someone dropped a napkin or a spoon or needed more sauce, more ice, more butter, I was hauling myself to go get, go get, go get, but I was hanging on, that's why Cal put me back there, because it would have been a disaster with some of the baby servers or fuckups in that station (LMB 177).

What customers see as a controlled performance, Marie likens to bull riding. During a busy service, the pace picks up and the routine breaks down. Every uncontrollable aspect of service multiplies and time contracts. The frantic nature of the shift is figured through the repetition of "or," which intensifies into "more," and finally the ultimate demand of "go get." At first the customer requests remain distinct, but as the tasks pile up, they blur into more, and finally undifferentiated getting. The compounding tasks and compounding clauses packed into in the second sentence evoke the overwhelmed feeling of a busy service. In addition to describing service as bull riding, Marie compares the constant exposure to demanding customers while frantically working to running the gauntlet. Recalling an earlier café job, Marie warns would-be servers:

So many times I ran that gauntlet. If I were to advise someone going into the service industry, my second suggestion after Don't would be Walk through the place and look for the tables farthest from the kitchen. You'll probably be stuck in that station for a couple months. Imagine walking from wherever that is all the way back to the kitchen for extra salad dressing. Now imagine it eighteen more times, and that's just for one table. You may think you'll be waiting tables but really your job is to walk fast in a circle for six to eight hours a day. Don't work somewhere with stairs, steps, ramps, outdoor seating, small water glasses, or kids' menus (LMB 58).

The key to service in this passage is not any discrete action, but knowing that any action will need to be done "eighteen more times," multiplied by however many tables the server has over the course of a shift. It is not merely mental and emotional labor that takes a toll, but the constant back-and-forth of the beck-and-call, the feeling of constantly walking in circles, which is made even more difficult based on the clientele, the layout of the restaurant, and one's subordinate status within it.

Love Me Back demonstrates how servers develop routines to manipulate interactions with customers in order to reduce the amount of touches made and time spent at each table. Marie explains:

The pros get the order taking down to a call-and-response that reads each guest's mind and draws out his selections for three courses with all pertinent temperatures and modifications in forty-five seconds or less, without letting him feel the slightest bit rushed. You expand your intake words, like Certainly and Absolutely and That won't be a problem, sir, you let them hang rich and pillowy and smile and the guest thinks only of how accommodating and efficient you are (LMB 192).

This description of the interaction demonstrates the interplay of skills service involves. Explicitly invoking professionalism, Marie explains that the experienced server elicits only the pertinent information while obfuscating the transactional nature of the conversation with a personal gloss. An effective service script means preempting and forestalling the desires of customers in order to buy time and complete the service in as few steps as possible. Marie learns "how to anticipate and consolidate, which is all waiting tables is" (LMB 33). She anticipates not only specific requests, but also entire interactions in an attempt to make them less unpredictable and to make less work for herself. Anticipation allows Marie to manage misogynistic customers and inappropriate comments. When a customer jokes that she is too lean to eat much meat, Marie replies:

No actually I'm vegetarian and they laugh at this because I have just shown them a tray of ten pounds of raw beef carved into the different cuts of steak we offer. I hype it, the tiny mystique of my being vegetarian and working there. I say Meat is my profession, which often leads someone at the table to say Well you're certainly a professional. I don't say I know, because I've made a hundred people before you say that same thing in this same situation, I've made you remember your charming professional vegetarian server when it's time for you to put a number on the tip line (LMB 212).

Not only does Marie parry the remark about her appearance, she uses this set piece to emphasize her professionalism and to charm customers into potentially leaving a larger tip. She reveals something personal that appears to be off-the-cuff, but is actually a routine interaction that the customer participates in unwittingly. This calculated reveal on the novel's final page is replicated in the experience of reading the novel: like the customers, readers learn about Marie's vegetarianism only in this scene. While the customer is not privy to this manipulation, the reader realizes Marie controls the information she reveals about herself. This suggests a relationship between Marie's skill as a server and Tierce's own skill as a novelist in controlling information and manipulating expectations and responses.

Through an aesthetic of painful repetition, the restaurant novel attempts to reproduce how it feels to work as a serve. Sweetbitter induces the exhaustion of mental and emotional labor in a set of formally distinctive lists that appear in each of the novel's four sections.51 Comprised of implied dialogue among members of the staff, these unattributed conversational fragments address working conditions, sexual harassment, heterosexism, the behavior of customers, and the food being served, as well as gossip, current events, aspirations, complaints, advice, and other non-work related conversation. Most fragments are non-sequiturs, although some respond to others. For example, the first list begins:

The sardines are insane tonight.
It's true, Chef called him a faggot.
HR is freaking out.
Have you been to Ssäm bar yet?
No, the best Chinese is in Flushing.
[...]
Table 43 is industry — Per Se?
If one more bitch cuts me off to ask for Chardonnay—
If one more person asks for steak sauce—
What the fuck? (S 45).

These fragmented staff conversations are interspersed between the script and performance used with customers. As such, they figure the split between the commoditized emotional labor of service and emotional work (which is not done for a wage, but has use value in making the shift more bearable). This split is between an ongoing, but interrupted "authentic" conversation among co-workers, and the series of repetitive, performative, and alienated interactions with customers. In this set of paratactic fragments, the novel inundates the reader with decontextualized information. This form of painful repetition acts as a release from the scripted affect that workers use with customers, but simultaneously exacerbates emotional fatigue through the constant alternation between constrained service interactions and these more authentic coworker interactions.

Although the work is alienating, its repetitive nature can be used to dull the stresses of life outside the restaurant. Stress can be managed by focusing on the next step in the work process. Marie notes, "I didn't take personally anything The Restaurant ever had in store for me. I just did the next thing as well as I could and then the next" (LMB 186). At Chili's, her second restaurant job as a teenager, Marie "worked all the time. Every night and doubles on weekends. I would pick up anyone's shift, anything to get my mind into that gray place. Everyone knew I would work for them if they asked." She learns "how to use work to forget" (LMB 49). She works to dull her constant anxieties and self-recriminations for her perceived inadequacy as a single mother. When asked to explain to another struggling employee how she manages not to crack under pressure, she glibly remarks, "Accept that shit is all fucked up and roll with it [...] Don't bitch. Just adapt. Nothing is going to go right and everything is going to be hard" (LMB 186-7). This attitude toward painful repetition allows Marie to get through her shift, but her ethos naturalizes the exploitative conditions of her work.52 Rather than speaking out, she privileges professionalism and individual resilience.

Tierce represents the coping strategies servers use to deal with the lasting effects of commoditized affect. Earlier in her career, Marie meets Tanya, a veteran server who:

had been halfway nice to me, in that beatup [sic] way career low-grade hospitality workers have. The ones in whom something has quit, bitterly, and then quit again, resigned. They've made it this far by not fucking up too much or knowing how to manage it when they do, so they're typically proficient if not too shiny. Tanya exhibited the classic mix I've seen in certain individuals who've been in the business for ten years or more: an air of woundedness, of insult, attributable to their prolonged indentured servitude, combined with an in-spite-of-it pride in their performance of the job (LMB 56-7).

Unlike Tess and Marie, Tanya is a lifer in the trenches of the service industry and bears the lasting damage of physical labor and commoditized emotion. Yet, a sense of spiteful satisfaction with the work accompanies this woundedness, showing that parts of affect that have not resigned completely: she is worse for the wear but not broken. Although perhaps felt more acutely in what Marie describes as "low-grade" jobs like Tanya's, the "classic mix" of the pleasure and pain of service work cuts across segments of the restaurant industry.

In Sweetbitter, Tess and her co-workers drink and take drugs as a means of turning service off.53 It is a response to and release from the stresses of service work, but it also comes with a price. The consequences are starker in Love Me Back. The scenes of restaurant work are intercut with graphic, and often extended, scenes of bad sex and masochism, drug and alcohol use and abuse, and self-harm. In a typical non-work scene while her visiting daughter watches reruns of The Cosby Show in another room, Marie burns the side of her neck with a fondue skewer she has heated over a gas burner: "It hurts but it feels good. I mean it feels like relief. The pain is real and synchronizes all the pain in the rest of my self that I cannot manage to organize. Draws it up to my neck and tells it what it is: You are pain, this is what you feel like" (LMB 155). Echoing Howard's warning to Tess in Sweetbitter that pain is the barometer of reality, the difficulties of service and life outside of it are brought together and ordered through self-inflicted physical pain — not coincidentally, inflicted with a hot fork in the kitchen and out of sight of her daughter. The pleasure of the pain downgrades as the passage unfolds, manifesting first as something that feels good, then as relief, and finally as merely real. In contrast to the painful repetition of the work and the struggle to make a life outside of it — pain she cannot control — Marie internalizes this self-inflicted pain until she can identify with it wholly. Marie triggers pain in order to self-manage it — an individual and temporary "resolution" to a collective problem.

Conclusion

Ever since Marx argued that the working class could not represent itself in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), theorists have discussed the relationship between the political and cultural representation of working people. Formally registering the physical, mental, and emotional labor of front-of-house restaurant workers, Sweetbitter and Love Me Back make legible a segment of contemporary labor that is simultaneously ubiquitous and opaque. Through an aesthetic of painful repetition, the restaurant novel represents how front-of-house workers experience the working day. These novels are set in upscale restaurants but represent problems that beleaguer all interactive service workers: physical strain, mental exhaustion, and the commodification of affect.54 By representing these material conditions through painful repetition and the split between emotional work and labor, the restaurant novel records the struggles that interactive service workers face. Yet while they elaborate on the experience of service work, they are less invested in what is to be done to make that work less exploitative.

Sweetbitter and Love Me Back are not social problem novels. It is not clear that the authors understand themselves to be writing labor novels or participating in a tradition of working-class fiction. The novels do not present a central thesis or political program. To a great extent, they focus on the individual experience of a worker rather than the collective work of the class.55 As Paula Rabinowitz reminds us, "[a] text may not necessarily express an identifiable political line, but it does express, explicitly or implicitly, specifically selected experiences from a specific point of view. This is what Raymond Williams calls the 'alignment' of writing."56 Despite not rising to the level of "committed" writing, these novels and their representations of painful repetition begin to articulate common grievances against the conditions of service work in ways that could be translated into and understood in class terms. But their aesthetic of painful repetition turns those grievances inward. They privilege professionalism, resilience, and individual responses to collective working conditions.

While they make the repetition of service work particularly legible, the novels studied here represent service as a sort of holding pattern. Tess and Marie work, but do not seem to get anywhere or accomplish much. Every shift is different, but instead of progression, there is repetition. The life-bracketing quality of service, if not necessarily fulfilling, provides a certain sense of structure. Marie does not initially enjoy the work, but she grows to tolerate it as something that shapes her days: "It wasn't that I liked waiting tables so much then — it was that I had somewhere to be. Some function in life" (LMB 34). The restaurant is a place to pass the time and to have something to do. For Tess, working service gives "the sense of safety that came from having a place to wait" (S 3). In this sense, waiting might be understood in terms of the animated suspension that Lauren Berlant calls a situation.57 The restaurant is where one waits for something to happen or, in the case of the authors studied here, for another career to materialize.

Yet if both novels emphasize the relative safety of waiting, this sense of security is a small luxury of the upper reaches of the restaurant industry. Unlike many service workers, Tess has a choice in her employment and luck in getting hired.58 Restaurant work, for her, is a test of moral character, not a way to make a life. Both a badge of honor and a mark of downwardly mobile class position, Tess and her coworkers view service as degrading work that they should not have to do, even as they know they are skilled professionals. Describing her coworkers' perceptions of their work, Tess admits that "[n]inety percent of us wouldn't put it on a résumé. We might mention it as a tossed-off reference to our moral rigor, a badge of a certain kind of misery, like enduring earthquakes, or spending time in the army. It was so finite" (S 3-4). Despite knowing the skill involved in the job, they do not consider it a career path. Tess claims not to "know what it is exactly, being a server. It's a job, certainly, but not exclusively. There's a transparency to it, an occupation stripped of the usual ambitions. One doesn't move up or down. One waits. You are a waiter" (S 3). Service takes place in an eternal present, the space between the brackets, seeming to lack both a past and any sort of futurity.

Perhaps this explains the lag in the cultural representation of service work. Those in a position to represent their experience are atypical not only of the restaurant industry, but the service sector as a whole. The representation of service does expose a range of problems with the work, which is not without political potential, but these grievances are filtered through a very specific experience of the cultural worker. The authors' shifts from high-end restaurant to creative work might mark the difference between waiting at these restaurants and other less professionalized sites of service work. To wait is to remain in place, but with expectations. One does not merely wait on someone, but one waits for something: a future contingency that will allow one to break from the repetition. To wait is to defer action until something else occurs to break the deadlock. When Tess is "promoted" to a more casual sister restaurant, which in her perspective amounts to being fired, Tess's erstwhile mentor Simone coldly tells her, "You weren't going to be here forever. You can get a real job now. A real boyfriend. Live in real time." Tess responds, "I have some money. I'm going to take my time" (S 350). If high-end restaurant service becomes the site from which the painful repetition of service work becomes culturally legible, the political demand it makes does not appear to be particularly urgent. Although Danler and Tierce themselves were able to move on to careers in the culture industry, workers in most segments of the service sector do not have any expectation of a way out.

While these novels present professionalized characters who are waiting for something to happen, service workers in segments of the service industry with less cultural capital have not awaited marching orders from cultural representation. Instead, service workers are representing themselves politically through organizing and direct action. Just as the representation has lagged behind the work it represents, the more elite end of the service industries lags behind those workers at the bottom. The most radical, exciting, and increasingly visible worker campaigns in recent years have come from non-tipped fast food, retail, and airport workers backed at times and to various degrees by unions, worker centers, and other alt-labor organizations. Fast food workers, whose modicum of cultural representation has traditionally been relegated to the realms of teen comedy films, represent themselves through campaigns like Fight for $15. Since 2012, "fast-food workers staged hundreds of one-day flash strikes, every few months in an ever-growing number of cities."59 On November 29, 2016, these workers staged a Day of Disruption, in which "low-wage workers protested in 340 US cities for a living wage, paid sick leave, and union rights."60 The Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart, has waged a surprisingly strong campaign of strikes and other actions against the U.S.'s largest private employer. As the middle class continues to be pushed into service sector, into work they may not have expected to make a career, they might look beyond the static self-representations they find in novels to these working-class campaigns in other segments of the service industries, united against those who exploit their labor, and representing themselves.

 

John Macintosh is a lecturer in English at the University of Maryland — College Park. He recently defended his dissertation, "The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction." The author would like to thank Annie McClanahan and an anonymous reviewer at Post45 for their incisive and generative readings of this article, as well as Palmer Rampell and Anna Shechtman for their editorial insight.

 

References