Several People Are Typing

"I’m not normally a fan of comic novels , but I make an exception for Calvin Kasulke’s surreal office comedy, told entirely through the medium of Slack. In it, an underperforming public relations executive finds his consciousness mysteriously uploaded into the servers of the instant messaging system, while his body remains unharmed, comatose in his apartment. His increasingly frantic requests for help are assumed by his superiors to be merely an irritating improvisational ‘bit’—and one they are willing to overlook, now that he is always online and apparently never more committed to his work. This is a compulsively readable novel that genuinely made me laugh out loud. I think it will appeal to anyone who has spent the pandemic working from home—read: almost everyone. Reminiscent of And Then We Came to the End , Joshua Ferris’s workplace novel told in the third person plural, it perfectly captures the choppy, polyphonic Greek chorus of a company’s #general channel. As one worker asks, rhetorically: “what is a workplace but a cult where everyone gets paid?” Is it a gimmick? Sure, but it’s one that I really enjoyed and I think you will too."