People who Lunch
Sally Olds’s essay collection, People who Lunch: Essays on work, leisure & loose living, deals primarily with worlds, or subcultures, on the margins of society. Each holds within it a kernel of hope for a different way of living: club culture with its embrace of hedonism and rejection of living-to-work; cryptocurrency’s promise of financial returns outside state-regulated markets and wage labour; polyamory’s attempts to break free of the stultifying nuclear family unit. None, however, has managed to pose any serious threat to the existing order and most have come to live comfortably within or alongside capitalism.
Olds trenchantly examines the uneasy processes of absorption, accommodation and commodification that take place when attempts to live or derive an income outside the mainstream are confronted with the realities of precarious work, sexism, personal insecurities or the myriad other pressures of neoliberalism. In a fittingly dizzying essay on cryptocurrency, Olds interviews cryptotraders in dank share houses who – having abandoned the idea of collectively changing the market-driven real world – experience an atomised version of the boom-bust cycle from their bedrooms as they ride the peaks and troughs of their respective currencies.
In “Fun in Venice”, a celebrated performance work presents an overproduced, Debordian spectacle of the eat-sleeprave-repeat club scene that is both a site of shared ecstasy and a communal pressure valve. Even writing, according to Olds, has been distorted by the relentless demand to innovate and garner clicks. Unfortunately, the essay “The Beautiful Piece” itself becomes somewhat circumlocutory in its takedown of the postmodern hybrid essay. And the study of an obscure, ageing fraternity makes for a desultory opening to what is otherwise an incisive collection.
“Manifesto for Post-work Polyamory” lays out the politics that Olds believes are necessary for a truly revolutionary approach to relationships, recognising the need to uproot the material conditions that constrain and stifle us at every turn. The crucial
“Post-” of the manifesto contrasts with the “actual” in the following – and easily the strongest – essay “For Discussion and Resolution”, where Olds’s own relationship provides a springboard to scrutinise the limitations of polyamory in a society built around monogamy, in which love can feel like yet another contractual arrangement to be negotiated. The legitimacy of polyamory, she argues, “will come by putting itself on the map of a future world, not by meekly asking for territory in this one”.
Throughout the book, Olds’s muted but sustained belief in the possibility and necessity of social change allows her to investigate, with a perceptiveness devoid of cynicism, our clumsy attempts to live out our ideals within a far from ideal world.
Upswell, 144pp, $29.99