WORK IN PROGRESS

A theologian’s sentimental education.

Martin, well known as a progressive Jesuit activist and editor at large of the magazine America, grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia in the 1970s and ’80s, a time when it was expected that a teenager would have a summer job—and, he writes, more than 58% of teens did in 1978, when he graduated from high school. These jobs were almost always unskilled, and without much transferrable knowledge: Being a busboy doesn’t teach you much about working a menial factory shift. Martin writes of the series of indignities that accompanied his résumé building: being screamed at for clearing a table prematurely, shafted by customers refusing to pay on his paper route, abandoned during an electrical storm while caddying. Though he’s not exactly sunny all the time—and his narrative takes a dark turn when tragedy strikes—Martin has a warm nostalgia for the era and most of the things that came with it, from boxes of Scholastic books and the Weekly Reader in grade school to tooling around on a bicycle long after dark and “drinking water from a backyard hose.” Granted, he notes, there were some demerits: People hadn’t learned yet to wear seat belts, and kids played with dangerous toys like lawn darts. One summer job leads to another, usually better one in Martin’s account until, after going through a pot-hazy, beer-drenched college education at Wharton (and how many road-to-Damascus memoirs quote Duran Duran and Neil Young?), he winds up working for a Fortune 500 company that threatens daily to kill his soul—a catalyst for quitting to become a priest. Martin offers valuable lessons from his experience, not just in the virtues of hard work and collegiality, but also in insisting, with John Paul II, on “the dignity of labor and the rights of workers.”

A pleasure for those who remember the lazy, hazy days of summer jobs at two bucks an hour.