Mother Knows Best

It seems like nobody wants to work anymore: so said Kim Kardashian earlier this year, and the contemporary novel tends to agree. Over the last few years, the anti-work novel has continued to grow in popularity, from Ling Ma’s Severance, which follows one woman working right into the apocalypse, to Calvin Kasulke’s Several People are Typing, which capitalizes on the hilarity of the workplace in a remote world, to Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, which picks up on questions of care work and its racialized and gendered demands. Emi Yagi’s debut novel, Diary of a Void, falls into this genre, though with some reluctance.