Kylie Warner
Office Culture: Shirley Hazzard’s stories of bureaucratic life
Curiously, many of Hazzard’s admirers seem to pass over Glass Houses in favour of her other work. This relative lack of attention is all the odder because the book is a thematic precursor to a recent wave of millennial novels featuring a specific sort of workplace – elite in character, and imbued with a lofty cultural, educational or humanitarian mission – in which even relatively privileged employees are subjected to deadening routines, curtailed opportunities for advancement and endemic demoralisation.