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As a freelancer for the last five years, being fired isn’t a looming threat in the way it is for a great many other people as I’m in a constant state of near unemployment anyways. But I have been fired before, often for the best. There was the skuzzy nightclub that I had erroneously convinced myself I had the week off from and to which I returned the following week to shocked stares from coworkers and managers. “What’s up, guys?” I said meekly, before they explained I did not, in fact, have the previous week off. Then there was the overpriced Queen West vintage store I worked at for a month, where the manager, “Jeff the Goth,” had conspired against me. He told the owner that all I did was show up stoned, sit listlessly and chain smoke while failing to push the skull rings. That may have been true, but being canned the week of Christmas sure did pinch, even if it meant I would never have to hear Jeff call his receding hairline a “natural widow’s peak” again.

I’ve since limited my schlepping to words, which some say is an endangered field. But I have a long history of unemployment from which to draw wisdom, and where there are gaps in that knowledge fiction fills in the rest. Now here, for free, is all that you can learn from authors about unemployment.

Raymond Carver

Just about any Carver short story collection will yield woes of the un- and underemployed but two works in Where I’m Calling From stick out. In They’re Not Your Husband, the down-at-his heels Earl stalks his on and off again wife Doreen at the diner where she works, making her and everyone else miserable. He goes on to obsess over her weight after some unwanted attention from loutish customers.

In Collectors, an out-of-work narrator waits in his apartment for the mail to arrive, hoping for news of work “up north.” Instead he receives a visit from a vacuum salesman, stating that the tenant’s ex-wife had filled out a contest form and had won a free shampooing. As the salesman sets out to clean the rug the two men are barely in the same conversation, but continue nonetheless, out of the shear boredom of their existences.

Sometimes Carver’s restraint damages his stories (and I for one think the film Short Cuts improved a few of them) but in these two stories the restraint gives a powerful clarity to a couple of men who don’t do much of anything other than brood.

Lesson for job hunters: Always socialize with people who are more successful than you.

William Gibson

For all their strange specialties and skills, William Gibson’s characters seem, more often than not, “in between jobs,” probably because Gibson’s best works channel the era they were written. In his 1986 collection Burning Chrome, his Sprawl setting is eerily Reaganomic in its rusty noir, and in the story New Rose Hotel, executives change jobs via kidnappings that are brokered by mercenaries and corporate headhunters.

Throughout the 1990s Gibson’s linked novels, from Virtual Light to All Tomorrow’s Parties, spoke to the downsizing merger mania that marked business culture as well as the threat of compound-named media monopolies. Recurring characters that tend to get worse and worse jobs along the way people these novels. In Idoru, Rydell is a onetime private security agent who ends up working as a convenience store guard while Laney, a gifted data analyst, lives in a cardboard box in Tokyo with a former salary man who paints on his “socks” using white-out. It’s Gibson’s sensitivity to class and disparity that has always been his edge over other writers of technology and future speculation.

Lesson for job hunters: Your goals should be fluid

Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland’s debut novel traveled from samizdat to Simpson’s punch line in a matter of months but never mind the expiry date. Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture still captures the choice faced by many lumpens in their late 20s: focus on a career, or just keep bartending to underwrite your nuclear themed-road trips?

Still in high school when the book was published in 1991, I got the humour (you can’t knock a man who popularized the term “legislated nostalgia”) but missed the ennui of floating through life in a cloud of irony that Coupland (pictued at top of this post)captured in his noun-bloated sentences. The book may have began as a non-fiction, generation’s user guide — the kind of hip schlock St. Martin’s Press was pumping out at the time — but Coupland started writing it as fiction instead. Generation X became something real by mistake, then marketable and fake through repetition and deracination. That was the 90s.

If anything, you can now ironically enjoy this ironic novel as a memento of a time when unemployment was optional rather than mandatory.

Lesson for job hunters: There are always positions open for “desert rat.”