The rise of the “gig economy” has translated into demands for “flexible,” “creative,” and precarious labor. This development subtends both a decline in reading and cultural representations of decline, which often include a pernicious longing for the disappearing stability of the cubicle and the suburban middle class. Four twenty-first-century US novels, Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris (2007), Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl (2021), Severance by Ling Ma (2018), and Luster by Raven Leilani (2020), negotiate cubicle nostalgia by representing the work of representation. They ask what comes next, at the end of the novel or the end of the world. They find in the meaning-making industries the remnants of the increasingly futile search for meaningful work. Solidarity, in these books, is sometimes impossible, sometimes elusive and contingent. While neither the publishing industry nor the art markets truly offer a means of survival or validation, some of these novels imagine that those most punished by too late capitalism might train their eyes to see new options. At the end of literature, in the shadow of the climate reports, perhaps clear vision might emerge from a willingness to look both death and our need for each other in the face.