Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One: Managing Desire -- 1."Dead letters . . . dead men?": The Rhetoric of the Oce in Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- 2. "And that paint is a thing that will bear looking into": The Business of Sexuality in The Rise of Silas Lapham -- 3. "A dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea": The Businessman and the Fairy Child in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt -- Part Two: Postwar Unsettlement -- 4. "The spirit of work weaves a magic wand": From Babbittry to Gray Flannel via Tropical Incorporation -- 5. "Opaque glass bricks": Sloan Wilson's Gray Flannel Man in the Queer Organization -- 6. "I ascend like a condor, while falling to pieces": Fear, Paranoia, and Self-Pity in Joseph Heller's Something Happened -- Part Three: A Word for Windows -- 7. "My own plein-air Arnality bared to the sky": Shoelaces, Social Energy, and Sexuality in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and The Fermata -- 8. "Frank Lloyd Oop": Microserfs, Modern Migration, and the Architecture of the 1990s -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.