Why would anyone give up a high-paying stimulating career in search of downward mobility? Solange De Santis, former writer for Reuters, Associated Press, and The Globe and Mail, did. In an unconventional career move, disenchanted De Santis left her high-powered job at Reuters to work on the General Motors van assembly line in Scarborough, Ontario during its final months of operation. Life on the Line is the story of the year and a half she spent at the van plant and of the characters she worked shoulder to shoulder with during that time. De Santis sets out to humanize the people behind the news story, to find out what they were thinking and feeling, to plunge into the factory world as one of her writer heroes, George Plimpton, did when he wrote about sports. Ultimately, though, the book’s true subject ends up being De Santis herself, as she faces her midlife turning point. Pressured from childhood by her driven mother to succeed and become a writer, De Santis writes that her career path was “apparent from the age of two.”

In Life on the Line De Santis has difficulty sustaining her story in book-length narrative and in making the switch from objective reportorial style to a first-person account. She’s a talented business journalist, yet faces challenges when writing at this length. The dialogue with her co-workers, for example, tends to drag; often it’s trite and clichéd. In the beginning, De Santis sentimentalizes the assembly-line workers, too; “A welder! A real assembly line worker! I felt as if I’d captured an auk, and veers towards lifeless characterization, “Chuck was a bit of a grouch.” The book is nowhere near as compelling as Heather Robertson’s investigation of GM a few years ago.

Nevertheless, De Santis is sincere, and expresses the fears and plight of the workers with empathy. At the same time, she cuts through the rhetoric of the union about the plant’s “superb quality.” In the end, the experience is more than an investigative story to De Santis, and becomes, “my Everest, my Zen monastery.”