Fall is the smell of new notebooks, freshly sharpened pencils, and brand new leather shoes. At least, that was the smell of fall before I became a teacher. As a student (even in college), I loved planning and organizing my approach to a new school year ripe with possibilities. As a teacher, I realize I now associate the beginning of school with last year’s chalk dust, this year’s asbestos dust, too many sweaty hormonally-charged bodies shoved into an un-air conditioned room, and moldy books. Of course, I teach in a poverty-ridden, overcrowded school last renovated in the 1960s (until this past summer when our apparently deranged approach to unsystematic demolition, renovation, and construction converged two days before students were due to return).

People outside the field of education will often ask why my fellow sufferers and I put up with this district. With so many other, newer, smaller, better-funded schools, why aren’t we leaving in droves? (Well, we always lose a few weak-hearted the first week, but that dust, at least, appears to be settling.) Knee-deep in graduate classes this year, I think I finally get it. We are all under the delusion that we have some higher purpose in our job. In a (very) sick way, we feel important, necessary. No reasonably sane person could work there unless she or he felt as though they were somehow removed from the daily grime. Our purposeful stress unites us.

I suspect that many careers are like this. Workers create a lofty rationale for their pain. But no one can hold a candle to Charlie Asher. "He got off at the end of the line, bought a Wall Street Journal from a machine, then walked to the nearest storm drain, spread out the Journal to protect his trousers against oil stains, then got down on his hands and knees and screamed into the drain gate, ‘I have been chosen, so don’t fuck with me!’ [...] As he headed back to the shop that particular morning, he realized, with no little sense of irony, that until he became Death, he’d never felt so alive." With that statement, Charlie brushed aside the smaller inconveniences associated with his new job—sewer-dwelling harpies, soul vessel collection risks, and hellhounds—and grasped his larger purpose in life.

Christopher Moore is known for his quirky sense of humor and ballsy writing, but Dirty Job takes this talent to a new level. Readers who enjoyed Zadie Smith’s White Teeth will find similarities between the two writers’ styles and zany subject matter. In Dirty Job, Moore endows his main character, Charlie, with immediate grief, the death of his young wife just as she gives birth to their first child, Sophie. Oddly enough, however, Charlie sees a tall black man dressed entirely in mint green leaving her bedside. He seems shocked that Charlie could see him, and he hurried away with Charlie’s wife’s favorite CD tucked inside his coat. For awhile after, things go from bad to worse, although Moore spins such a sad tale with so much humor that it hardly seems like death could really be so bad.

Finally, though, the "beta male" that is Charlie embraces his new identity, finds his higher purpose, and begins living life with Sophie to the fullest, seeking excellent cheese with wild abandon. With a host of other part-stereotypical, part-boundary-breaking characters, Charlie finds plenty of help with his new daily routine. There’s Jane, his sweet, androgynous, David Bowie-esque, Italian suit-swiping lesbian sister with commitment issues; the English-impaired-but-Sophie-loving widows Korjev and Ling; and Lily, his brooding, mouthy, sixteen-year-old, school-ditching employee who is already unhealthily obsessed with death and, quite frankly, finds Charlie’s new identity a complete travesty of justice.

As the years whiz by, Charlie encounters many opportunities for growth via his friends and his new job. Most of his friends are concerned about his lack of relationships, and they push him to lose what they feel may be a harmful attachment to death. Jane lays it on the line for Charlie: "‘She was a sweet woman, and you’re much more pitiful now than you were then. You had more hair then, and you didn’t have a kid and two dogs the size of Volvos [(Sophie’s pets, the 400-pound hellhounds)]. Hell, there’s probably some order of nuns that would do you now, just as a holy act of mercy. Or penance. [...] The Sisters of Perpetual Nookiless Suffering. [...] The Holy Order of Saint Bonny of the BJ, patron saint of Web porn and incurable wankers.’" Jane sees a lot more action than Charlie, given that the book is set in gay-friendly San Francisco.

Ultimately, Moore manages to inject humor in many different forms into a book that deals with some heavy topics: dealing with grief, rescuing the self from loneliness, and searching for a purpose or identity to be gleaned from a very dirty job indeed.