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For a few months I contributed to a gossip column that accorded Paris Hilton the level of coverage Prevention accords cancer. Like the columnists in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, my colleagues and I were parasites on a parasitic aristocracy, and it was sort of empowering. Our job, I learned, was to disclose the secrets of people who never seemed to work, for readers who considered themselves overworked and undervalued. We slaked a thirst for schadenfreude and a thirst for escape. We made Paris Hilton a character people needed.

The novelists and short story writers of my generation offer the same release: They put the reader on intimate terms with characters who don’t think that often about work. I find this striking because jobs have been the dominating issue of my adult life. Jobs have affected how I relate to my family, where I live, and whom I’m in love with, and jobs have consumed the vast majority of my waking hours. I can’t imagine writing a novel in which jobs are not a central concern. Would I be a better writer if I had the money to study writing at Columbia or African drums in Vermont, or to lock myself in an apartment with a manuscript and a portrait of Solzhenitsyn? Few young writers have Hilton’s resources to play with (I mean this in a strictly monetary sense), but the Northeast is full of nonstarving novelists-to-be who do nothing terribly lucrative. If I were one of them, would I write mostly about extraprofessional matters, as admirable writers roughly my age—Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, and Nell Freudenberger—have done? Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated is about an American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer exploring the fate of Jews in the Ukraine, and a Ukrainian translator with a distinctive grasp of English. Cross-cultural relationships are also the most prominent recurring theme in Freudenberger’s story collection Lucky Girls. Moving between East and West is the single greatest theme in Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth. It’s not that jobs aren’t described well; they’re just not the center of attention and identity.

There is a small subgenre of fiction in the George Saunders vein that explores the metaphorical and comical possibilities of the protagonist’s surreal work life—often at a nightmarish amusement park or roadside attraction that serves as a microcosm of the world outside. But that’s not the same as a realistic portrait of jobs a lot of people actually have, like banking, like waiting tables. I don’t know of any young voice offering realistic portraits of contemporary American lives defined by normal, time-consuming, soul-altering occupations. None of this constitutes a failure on the part of the writers I’ve mentioned; it’s simply a choice of focus, or a respectable compulsion toward a particular set of subjects.

I’m apt to wonder if I’d write less about work, and perhaps be a better writer for it, if I had a trust fund. Wouldn’t an allowance give me more time to write, and make it more natural to create warm protagonists whose lives are not defined by their jobs? I had a trust fund at one point, and its effect upon my writing—perhaps even more so the effect of its departure upon my writing—was considerable.

England’s Labour government won reelection in 1966, when my father was in college. Shortly thereafter, the way my father tells it, an alumnus who lived nearby came to eat at my father’s club, to which he’d once belonged, and found himself in a crowd that shared his Tory sympathies. My father was a Labour booster, and a vocal one.

When I was in preschool this alumnus gave my father a job running his charitable foundation. My family visited him on his estate outside Boston every couple of months. My memories of it are precious: paintings by major impressionists on the walls, ships in glass cases, a ballroom, a green, rolling field speckled with white geese behind a big brick house. As I got older and my father moved on to new jobs, we visited less; when I was in junior high, I accompanied my father on our first visit in years. The alumnus was feeble now. With death so near, he said things he used to keep to himself. As he ate lunch at the head of his long dining-room table, a tall window shedding golden light over his wild gray hair, he spoke with unusual tenderness about a man my father knew.

My father informed us of this development in a five-minute family meeting, the longest discussion about it we’ve ever had. There might have been a whiff of Dickensian fairy tale about the windfall—a benefactor descends and frees a brother and sister from ordinary toil, or in this case having to apply for financial aid for college—but my father made it clear we were not to think of the investments that way. He was terse and vague about the money and the rules that governed it, making clear that the news should prevent us only from worrying about college tuition. He forbade us to talk about it to anyone. My sister and I have talked about it obsessively ever since, and in an exceedingly vulgar manner. So many questions arose: Just how posh did this make us? Was it OK to start drinking a lot of scotch? This store called Brooks Brothers came up occasionally in movies—could we maybe go?

For despite my father’s wishes we’d been infected with a sense of security, exacerbated when my father married my first stepmother, a magazine editor who lived in Manhattan, drove a red BMW, liked Jil Sander, and, having grown up with a stepmother herself, knew to treat us like friends rather than offspring. When I left for college and my sister for boarding school, my stepmother’s prosperous father paid for both, presumably reducing the strain on the trust fund. He volunteered to pay for my second year, too. I began to tally how much cash would be waiting for my sister and I when we graduated.

The idea of inheriting money was especially appealing because we’d grown up mostly with our mother, who never had any money. There were a lot of unpleasant boys like myself raised in Massachusetts college towns by single mothers in grad school living on child support and part-time jobs, and we were terrorized by kids from the neat subdivisions that rose between the orchards. They hated our hand-me-down clothes, our mumbling hippie locutions, our incompetence at sports, and our generic sneakers. How could people dressed that way put on airs of knowingness, of sanctimony, the way we did? What kind of secret did we think we had on them? We couldn’t even shave right—what was our problem?

In accordance with my reputation in high school, I tried to write the way teens with bohemian aspirations all over America do—exactly like Allen Ginsberg. When my stepmother rolled onto the scene, the Howl impulse gradually gave way to a more genteel—more cosmopolitan, I believed—worldweariness and humor and restraint. Soon I’d be part of a bigger, warmer, more free-spending world. What was there to get so embattled about?

The decline of this personal Belle Epoque began about two years later. My stepmother divorced my father, which ended her father’s funding of my education, weekends at her familial hideaways, and Miu Miu dresses for my sister. My father started dating a woman who wanted children. By the time I graduated from college at twenty-one, I had a second stepmother who was pregnant with a child who would require schooling from Upper West Side preschool onward. Another child followed thirteen months later. The gorgeous baby boys were just as much the children of my father as my sister and I, and the fund was explicitly created for all children of my father, rather than just my sister and me, the extant children at the time of its establishment, so there was no discussion; after graduation I was going to get nothing. When I finished college in 1999, my father and stepmother lent me the security deposit for an apartment in a slum in Brooklyn, and that was that. I was trust-fund-less. It was time to put the sweater vests in storage and invent a new, more hardened accent. It was time to find a job.

My father knew the parks commissioner. To my dismay his people gave me a job in a rec center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, finding permanent full-time jobs for people enrolled in its welfare-to-work program. I slouched around the office with an air of profound martyrdom. The clients were mostly middle-aged single mothers of asthmatic children. I had just turned twenty-two. My title was Employment Expert.

Usually, I would send the clients out to chase a lead I’d uncovered for them in Manhattan. They would shrug and mutter something about how it was too far away from where their children went to school. I would insist they should try to get it anyway, and they would trudge to the subway in pairs. They did not return employed. At one point during one of the morning pep talks I gave, a Jamaican woman lifted her head and screamed.

She was right, of course. When I gave up trying to help anybody, because I’d scored my first magazine job at Life and given two weeks’ notice, the clients and I started to have amiable conversations about music, TV, and the Civil War. They explained they were never going to work very far from their homes because of the asthma attacks their children were always having. A daughter’s school would call to say she was on a stretcher, and there would be nothing for it but drop the bar code scanner and escort her to the hospital. They’d had jobs before, and the regularity of medical emergencies had gotten them fired. Or they hadn’t had jobs before, but they’d heard from their friends that such an outcome was to be expected. They were holding out for a theoretical receptionist position that would allow them to escape to an East Brooklyn school district whenever they needed. They were biding their time attending my workshops and spiking trash in the parks wearing green vests with the parks department’s leaf insignia on the back. This was what they did to keep their benefits.

I had lucked into a job as an arts reporter at Time just after LIFE shut down and started to write about people who thought about money and work a lot. I didn’t realize that this was kind of fifteen years ago. Some of the most famous American novels published when I was in grade school, across a wide spectrum of literary prestige, and including books by young writers—White Noise, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Bright Lights Big City, American Psycho—hit their highest notes rifling through the protagonist’s office. DeLillo had his department of Hitler Studies, McInerney his coke-fueled fact-checking procedures, Wolfe his hungover gossip writer, Ellis his demented financier. Michael Lewis got rich when he ditched his Wall Street job to satirize Wall Street in Liar’s Poker. Then, if novels are a guide to such matters, we slacked off a bit and devoted more time to family and ancestors.

What happened? It’s a familiar argument that our field is increasingly cloistered and professionalized, that writers are concentrated in dewy glades where neither cars nor televisions disrupt their communication with God. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, fifty American colleges started new creative writing programs between 1996 and 2002; between 1992 and 2002, according to the nonprofit organization Associated Writing Programs, the number of graduate writing programs nearly doubled. No doubt a direct plunge from college to MFA program to professorship could deprive a writer of contact with the corporate and business worlds in which more typical careers unfold.

But I wonder if the more important factor is that it’s gotten harder to be the kind of nine-to-fiver who writes before and after work, to be William Carlos Williams scribbling poems on prescription slips between patients. For the statistics on work are clear: Jobs take a bigger bite out of our lives than they used to. In a survey cited in the New York Times in the fall of 2004, 62 percent of respondents said their workload had increased in the past six months alone. A front-page Times story from July showed that Europeans curse the sky and follow us into a more Spartan work-to-leisure ratio. It’s a trend that works to deprive us of the poem by the doctor about her patients, the novel by the judge about the defendant. Would Wallace Stevens have written The Emperor of Ice Cream if his day at the insurance company had been thirteen hours long?

You can’t blame writers for turning to academia. But the result is that as we work more and more, young writers write about work less and less, distinguishing themselves by exploring different ethnic and national cultures, which is something people do in English departments. We do not read much about the varied forms of employment that create such wide gaps between perspectives, such different everyday lives.

And still the public, despite its Hilton fixation, displays an appetite for stories about work. Look at television (if you’re reading this book it’s possible that you would benefit from watching more television). The Apprentice is pornography for people who daydream behind a counter at Wendy’s about stabbing the salad bar guy in the back in order to make shift manager. All over Los Angeles, proud TV writers sell their Miatas because of shrinking demand for the sitcoms about families they used to write. The reality shows that marched over the sitcoms offer a kind of sublimated workplace in which the object is winning a Darwinian struggle for money.

Look at commercial fiction. The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada not only sold well among people steeped in the lore of Upper East Side parenting and the offices of Vogue; they were national publishing phenomena, presumably at least in part because they describe the experience of being a relatively poor woman working for comically awful rich women. They trade in humor about posh drudgery and the relationships between bosses and peons. Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, another success, revolves around the problem of how to be both an accomplished professional and an attentive mother.

Of course, all three of those titles draw quite directly from their authors’ experiences; the fuss over the first two started because they seemed to be tell-alls clothed as fiction. It’s a different task to imagine what other people’s jobs are like, in much the way writers my age have so adeptly put themselves in other people’s ethnogeographic perspectives. I’d like a writer of my generation to perform the task the parks department set me (and in which I so spectacularly failed): understanding work lives and work-related aspirations that are exotic to middle-class creative people. What’s it like to be a twenty-seven-year-old Republican lawyer working seventy-hour weeks in San Diego? Or a twenty-six-year-old restaurant manager in Dallas who works two jobs to support two children? A security guard at the Woolworth building who moonlights tending bar off Wall Street?

Let’s face it; my generation will probably be defined partially by its military response to the aggression of radical Islam and aspiring superpowers, but it will also be defined by its economic response—its inglorious pursuit of money. I don’t mean class, or the right table at the right restaurant, but money. Money to send your kids to an adequate school, money to retire without all that much pharmaceutical deprivation, money to be able to float for a while should a job disappear, money to pack your family off to a country house if an office building down the block gets blown up, money to stop working so many hours when you’re no longer young. Money to buy that elusive, intoxicating sense of security shaping up to be one of the delicacies of our age.

In so many contemporary novels, the ethnic makeup of a family has a real, if not transfiguring, effect on a character’s life. (This is not true just of fiction by “ethnics”; Jessica Shattuck’s WASP-y heroine in The Hazards of Good Breeding feels confined to a small world.) The trajectory of my life has been set by the movements of dollars, and not even remotely by the fact that I am half Jewish and half Irish. I write fiction about people who obsess about jobs and money because I can’t imagine people who do not. If I succeed, I will capture the repressed panic, the incessant scrambling, and I will become my generation’s literary Employment Expert. I could sure use the work.