What once seemed absurd today seems like realism

Banjamin Marcus got a lot of notice for his first books, somewhat experimental stories, The World of Wire and String or some such title, he's also a Brown grad I think - making two weeks in a row for Brown folks to appear in New Yorker fiction (old friend Robert Coover's excellent, very short story, Going for a Beer, was in last week). I hadn't read Marcus before, and I like his story - is it really a story or is it a chapter from the forthcoming, as are most NYer fiction selections these days? - Rollingwood, and I'll look out for his future works. Rollingwood is in that fledgling genre of the corporate displaced, usually guys, totally unable to make it in the modern world, low-ranking anonymous employees or anonymous corporations, feckless family men, loners - in other words, the typical modern American short-story protagonist (women in short stories often have a lot of friends, Ann Beattie's stories, q.v., but the men more and more seem to be total outsiders) - Mather, in this story, seems to know nobody except his ex-wife. He's trying to take care of their asthmatic infant, and hang on to a job - but he's evidently been fired without his even knowing that - temps have taken over his desk while he's out for one day. The line of influence here stretches back to most recently that pretty good novel And Then We Came to the End, about corporate disassemblage - but even further back to Barthelme - the guy who finds himself inexplicably assigned to a grade-school class - and before that to Kafka: the absurd, the incomprehensible way in which modern life has its will with so many of us. Yet what at one time seemed truly absurd and comic, today seems more frightfully real, as so many have experienced sudden downsizing and life on the street. Marcus's story could happen to any of us.