currently reading: Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan
books bought:
NONE! But I have pre-ordered the following:
- All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld (out 4/2)
- Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham (out 3/12)
books received:
- Inverno by Cynthia Zarin
- The Fraud by Zadie Smith
- Parade by Rachel Cusk (out 6/3)
books finished:
- There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America's Biggest Catfish by Anna Akbari (out 6/4)
- Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman (out 3/5)
- The Book of George by Kate Greathead (out 10/8)
- Car: A Drama of the American Workplace by Mary Walton
- Women by Chloe Caldwell
Hey you,
Recently I read Mary Walton's 1997 book Car: A Drama of the American Workplace based on the recommendation of a random Bluesky user, someone I didn't even follow. The recommendation wasn't directed at me, it was just a sort of PSA that Car is the best nonfiction book no one has ever heard of. (I've just looked it up and the recommender was Whet Moser.) It's a book about the designing and building of the 1996 Ford Taurus. (And the Sable, and the Taurus station wagon: these were afterthoughts to everyone involved, it seems like.) Based on that description, you know, I couldn't give a shit. I don't care about cars; if anything, I have an animosity towards them, the origin of which I documented in these hallowed pages. Here's all I notice about a typical car: that's an SUV, or a sedan, or a big awful truck; that one is big, that one is tiny; this one is red, that one is black. I couldn't tell you if it was a Kia Sonata or a Range Rover—make and model are just not things I usually notice. I don't really even see cars. So reading about their technical specifications sounds like the most boring thing I could imagine.
But I checked the book out from the library, because it's free, why not, and it turns out random Bluesky users sometimes make good points. I am now fully on board with the concept of the algorithm.
Walton embedded with the team behind the Taurus redesign, known internally as DN101, for four years. Four years! Ford seems to have let her had pretty much free reign: she must have interviewed hundreds of people, many of whom spoke more frankly than I would've expected. (She writes in the beginning of the book that shortly before she released the book, Ford seemed to get cold feet, and the people at the company she'd previously spoken to were instructed to refer her calls to public relations.) She followed the car from the earliest planning stages to prototype to media blitz to car dealerships.
A signifier of a world-class nonfiction writer is whether they can make me read about something I don't care about. Mary Roach on the alimentary canal in Gulp, Brian Phillips on sumo wrestling in his essay "The Sea of Crises," which I first encountered in his book, Impossible Owls. Walton easily joins their ranks.
Part of the the trick is that the Car is really about people, and about work: it's more focused on Ford as a workplace than it is the technical specifications of the car (although my legions of gearhead fans don't need to worry—there are still plenty of technical details included). But it's equally true that Walton is a skilled writer: she's able to write conversationally without the book sounding overly casual or without inspiring (in me, at least) that cloying feeling of oh no, they're trying too hard to be my friend.1 She's funny. She's able to write about the technical stuff—automotive and managerial—without letting it bog down the narrative or bore me to tears. For example, here's how she starts a passage explaining Ford's management system in the 90s—I think it's pretty representative of the book's style:
The proliferation of meetings was by no means confined to Ford, or to the automobile industry. Across America, voice mail was answering the phones of people clumped together around long tables in little rooms. Sometimes there weren't enough people to go to all the meetings. And certainly there was little time left over for what used to be considered work. If employees were asked, they could tell you that 90 percent of the time they spent in meetings was a waste. But since no one asked them, the get-togethers continued unabated. As corporations began to downsize in the 1990s, the pressure mounted on people to be more productive with what little time they had. Adversity for some is opportunity for others—in this case, management gurus.
The book tells a linear story, interspersed with little vignettes about people—mostly Ford employees—who usually come up later in the book, though sometimes not. One of the most memorable of these vignettes describes Rand Bitter, a finance guy (that's how they're referred to in the book!) on a mission to cut costs on cars at Ford. Like one time he notices the cargo net in the back of the new Taurus is made of cheaper material than the one used in Mustangs, so he gets Ford to switch to the cheaper cargo net in the Mustang, too, which saves $1.68 per Mustang produced. "The supplier had a fit, but Bitter had no sympathy for suppliers. He had been told by more than one underling that their job was to wring all the money they could out of Ford." The passage ends:
Bitter's passion for thrift carried over to his personal life. One of the planners now balked at eating lunch with him because of the time they went to Pizza Hut for the $4.15 all-you-can-eat Wednesday special. Everybody slapped down $5, for the meal and the tip. Everybody but Rand. He put down a bill and then he did something weird, like took the change back and left a dime. "Cheap, cheap, cheap," said the planner.
You just feel you get such a good sense of who these people really are! And Car is at its strongest in the first two-thirds of the book, when Walton can really focus on them and their goal: beating the Toyota Camry. I was impressed by how much Walton made me care about them. Who'd've thought I'd feel invested in where the DN101 office should be located? It was the first of many drama-filled decisions: the team's leaders wanted space at Ford's Design Center, filled with the designers who model car prototypes out of clay, but the designers objected: "The building was filled with artisans, people of taste and refinement who did not fancy an invasion of outsiders." Walton continues:
Sorry, no space, said the people from the Design Center. No sweat, said Bell and Breault; the Design Center had an interior paved courtyard that was ringed with studios where designers could work in natural light hidden from the spying eyes of the outside world. 'We can just bring in some double-wide office trailers and park them in the courtyard.' The Design Center could see where this was headed. The courtyard would look like some low-rent downriver mobile home park strewn with tires and fenders, and engineers coming and going in short-sleeved white shirts... Okay, okay, the DN101 team could have the basement.
After the design process is complete, Walton did bed in with some factory workers and some car dealers, but obviously not for as long as she spent with the Ford people—that would have to be a whole other book. Two other books. It was still a good read—I didn't know, for example, that car dealers think of us, the general public, the same way we think of them (as misers and liars)—but these parts that took place after the car left the hands of the DN101 team (necessarily) felt a bit more perfunctory than the rest of the book.
In the same way it's intriguing to find out the internecine drama in a random subculture on Reddit, it's just interesting to read a reported account of someone else's workplace issues—at least I think so, nosy as I am. Especially when these are the people making the decisions about the way our cars look and operate—the way our lives look, for a lot of people. They fight all the time! There are petty little feuds that lead to larger issues down the line! Can't they just figure out what kind of headlamps to use later? What fabric should be used on the seats—the one the designers like or the one the engineers like? (The one the finance guys like.) And why can't they all get jackets with the Taurus logo if the factory workers get them?
I thought about trying to turn this into some kind of essay on workplace dramas. I even read Adelle Waldman's new book, Help Wanted, which follows a group of employees at a big box store, so I could make some witty and illuminating comparisons. But the truth is when I finished Help Wanted I didn't have many thoughts beyond That was nice. I was also going to cite Joshua Ferris's novel Then We Came to the End, which follows an office of ad agency workers in Chicago. I do remember I loved it—it's just I can't remember the particulars. But I think my affection for it has something to do with my interest in reading about the DN101 team. Working with people is such a funny way to get to know them; a workplace brings out so many quirks in people. In many ways you know your colleagues more than most of the other people in their lives—you're the one spending hours and hours with them in a given week. But because of the circumstances in which you spend your hours and hours together your colleagues are often fundamentally unknowable to you. More than I love reading about what people do all day—which I do2—I love reading about that tension that only arises between colleagues.
It's been quite a car-heavy week for me. Despite the fact that Thursday, my birthday, is the 12th anniversary of me getting my driver's license, I just this weekend successfully pumped gas for the first time. I managed to avoid it for so long by driving almost exclusively in New Jersey, the nation's only remaining civilized state. But now that my mom has moved down south I figured it might not hurt to learn.
Your friend,
Smalls
P.S. Yes, the newsletter is on Buttondown now. This is for all the political reasons and also because my friend signed up for the newsletter on Substack recently and was prompted to pledge like $100 a year, even though this newsletter will never cost money and I've never indicated to Substack in any way that I'd like to monetize it. You can't just go around asking people for money on my behalf like I put you up to it and get away with it!!!
1. Do NOT look at the name of this newsletter.↩
2. Although I haven't yet red Studs Turkel's Working. I borrowed it from the library once, but I made the mistake of trying to read it like a novel, instead of picking it up from time to time. I'll give it another shot someday. ↩