The virtue of shirking work

“Bonjour Laziness” is an exhilarating complaint against work. At first it seems strange that a French person, who has a workweek limited to 35 hours and gets five weeks’ annual vacation by law, along with numerous religious and secular holidays, would have any complaint against work. But on reflection: who better? Your typical American wage slave gets two weeks’ vacation, a smattering of legal holidays and, although the workweek is limited by law to 40 hours, it is usually just the beginning of what a person is expected to give over to the boss.

Corinne Maier has a simple ambition. This provocative book is aimed at “ ‘demoralizing’ you -- that is, in the sense of making you lose your morale.” It “will help you to take advantage of the firm you work for, which up until now has been taking advantage of you. It will explain why it’s in your best interest to work as little as possible, and how to undermine the system from within, without appearing to do so.”

It is a little hard for Americans to read a French woman on the perils and snares of work. We Americans are still in some part resentful hicks who forget the French helped free us from England, continue to teach us how to cook and are still tutoring us on what to wear, as witnessed by the retrospective in honor of Chanel in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Before getting to the handy and highly readable steps for freeing ourselves from the burden of work, Maier lets us know that contrary to the cliche that showing up is everything, “[t]he most important thing is to participate as little as possible. And this might even be enough -- who knows? -- to reduce the system to dust. (The communists twiddled their thumbs for seventy years and one fine day the Berlin Wall came crashing down.)”

What is refreshing about Maier is that her book is no call to arms, no call to the barricades, no reminder of the so-called wonderful days of the ‘60s. At one point she asks rhetorically: What happened to the class of ’68 and replies that they are your bosses. Of course it can be observed that they are just as ruthless, just as corrupt and stupid as any class of bosses from any other era.

Echoing in its title the famous novel “Bonjour Tristesse” by Francoise Sagan, which celebrated the dangerous pleasures of fast cars, drink and frivolous sex, Maier celebrates a delicious, cynical, sour attitude toward work, something we Americans need more of. We love our favorite drug, which is work, while forgetting that Communism, Nazism, Socialism join happily with capitalism in one shared passion: work. It’s too bad that this God-fearing nation doesn’t take seriously the lesson from the Bible that work was a curse laid upon Adam. We are not eating dust for its own pleasure.

While self-help books only help as long as you are reading them -- as Walker Percy wisely noted -- Maier’s can be used as a sort of on-demand consultancy or topical spine stiffener. The very titles of her chapters let you realize how practical her book is: Business is Not Humanistic; Business Speaks an Incomprehensible No-Man’s Language; The Dice are Loaded; etc.

This is the perfect book to send your son or daughter off to college with since Maier is ever helpful and you do want to be of assistance to those kids. Here is the bracing, necessary, chilly comfort they’ll really need no matter what: “[D]on’t throw away your diplomas yet. They may not measure intelligence or competence, but at least documents are proof that the wage earner, the small-time manager, knows how to buckle down. Only a former student who was able to tolerate years of study, the stupidity of his teachers, the pressure of friends to do what everyone else is doing, is capable of putting up with the banality and repetitiveness of thirty-odd years in an office.”

Thomas McGonigle is the author of “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov” and “Going to Patchogue.”