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Getting back to it.

• Joshua Ferris looks into the importance of work in literature in The Guardian.

Ferris, the author of the current talk-of-the-literati workplace novel Then We Came to the End, gets in some good observations. You might almost consider this a commentary track for his book:

Work, then - broadly defined - is central to literature. Don Quixote goes headlong into the windmill - what is the noble fool doing but his misguided work? Work puts Ishmael on the Pequod. Work brings Esther to Bleak House and sends Humbert Humbert to the house on Lawn Street. Work defines the plot and central moral conceit of Ian McEwan's Saturday. Work as wayward scientific inquiry prompts Tyrone Slothrop's erections during the Blitz and forces him out into the Zone in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, while work as blind loyalty reveals the trouble with blind loyalty in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. These examples highlight how vocation in literature is never happenstance, never half-hearted decision-making, but artfully premeditated and always purposeful. Work does work in every great book - even if just to allow the characters enough leisure time to pursue the main drama.

As strategically and thematically smart as Fitzgerald is when assigning vocations to his characters - vocations that aid and abet by professional title the novel's personal drama - he nevertheless keeps work-related matters topical. It is the nature of the work, not the work itself, that informs. A different story arises when a writer chooses to go deeper into work, to turn work into one of literature's main characters.

It speaks

• Thomas Pynchon, among others, has come out in support of Ian McEwan.

Thomas Pynchon, who vies with J D Salinger for the title of the world's most secretive author, has broken his strict rules on privacy to join a campaign to clear the British Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan of charges of plagiarism.

In a move described by his British publisher as "unknown", Pynchon, an American who is never seen in public, does not give interviews and whose whereabouts are a closely guarded secret, sent a typed letter to his British agent yesterday to say that McEwan "merits not our scolding but our gratitude" for using details from another author's book.

More at the New York Times.

A mountain out of a molehill

• More accusations of plagiarism, this time aimed at Ian McEwan.

McEwan seems to have copped to it all along, anyway, so what's the big kerfuffle all about?

McEwan, 58, said Andrews was a source of "inspiration" for his novel and its characters.

"An inspiration, yes. Did I copy from another author? No," he said on his Web site (www.ianmcewan.com).

While researching "Atonement," his 2001 work shortlisted for the Booker prize for fiction, he came across "No Time For Romance" in an Oxford library and drew on its descriptions of life in a London hospital during World War Two.

"As with the Dunkirk section, I drew on the scenes she described," he wrote in his rebuttal.

"For certain long-outdated medical practices, she was my sole source and I have always been grateful to her."

He added that he acknowledged his debt to Andrews in the author's note at the end of "Atonement" and spoke about her in numerous interviews.

"My one regret is not meeting her," he continued. "But if people are now talking about Lucilla Andrews, I am glad."