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Help Wanted
In Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and knack for social observation to the world of work.
At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement―among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her “cool kid” status from high school, a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living.
At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement―among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her “cool kid” status from high school, a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living.
304 pages, Paperback
First published March 5, 2024
1290 people are currently reading
33916 people want to read
About the author
Adelle Waldman
9 books460 followersAdelle Waldman is the author of the novels, Help Wanted, coming from W.W. Norton in March of 2024, and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was published by Henry Holt in 2013 and was named one of that year’s best books by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and others. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her husband and daughter.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,526 reviews
December 18, 2023
I don't know if I have the words to do this book justice, so I'll start with a little anecdote...
I recently recommended a book to a colleague of mine. (It's not important what the book was.) He read half of it, returned it to me, and said, "This is the best possible example of a book about ordinary people doing ordinary things, but I hate books about ordinary people doing ordinary things. Why would I want to read about someone just like me?"
This was the moment that I realized my absolute favorite genre of book is "Ordinary People Doing Ordinary Things." I love when an author is able to capture the human experience in a way that feels deeply relatable and authentic. And Help Wanted is one of the best examples of this type of book that I have ever read.
In the same breath, I don't know how to recommend this book to anyone. What a challenge it is to explain that a fictional book about a logistics team for a Target-like superstore is one of my favorite books I've read this year (possibly ever). So far, when I've tried to do just that, the typical response is, "Ugh, what? That sounds so boring." But I think that's the beauty of it. Because life can be so mundane, so frustrating, so hard. And this book shows that amidst all that mundanity exist these tremendously complicated human beings with their specific hopes and dreams and individual histories and identities. I was rooting for so many of them, knowing that by rooting for one, I was simultaneously betting against the others.
By the last 50 pages of the book, I was intentionally slowing down my reading so I could savor the experience. I wasn't ready to be done with these characters. I found it tremendously comforting to read about their days, about their fictional lives. I am truly looking forward to reading Waldman's debut novel soon, as well as anything she may publish in the future.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and W. W. Norton for the e-ARC of this book. I have every intention of purchasing a physical copy when it is released next year.
I recently recommended a book to a colleague of mine. (It's not important what the book was.) He read half of it, returned it to me, and said, "This is the best possible example of a book about ordinary people doing ordinary things, but I hate books about ordinary people doing ordinary things. Why would I want to read about someone just like me?"
This was the moment that I realized my absolute favorite genre of book is "Ordinary People Doing Ordinary Things." I love when an author is able to capture the human experience in a way that feels deeply relatable and authentic. And Help Wanted is one of the best examples of this type of book that I have ever read.
In the same breath, I don't know how to recommend this book to anyone. What a challenge it is to explain that a fictional book about a logistics team for a Target-like superstore is one of my favorite books I've read this year (possibly ever). So far, when I've tried to do just that, the typical response is, "Ugh, what? That sounds so boring." But I think that's the beauty of it. Because life can be so mundane, so frustrating, so hard. And this book shows that amidst all that mundanity exist these tremendously complicated human beings with their specific hopes and dreams and individual histories and identities. I was rooting for so many of them, knowing that by rooting for one, I was simultaneously betting against the others.
By the last 50 pages of the book, I was intentionally slowing down my reading so I could savor the experience. I wasn't ready to be done with these characters. I found it tremendously comforting to read about their days, about their fictional lives. I am truly looking forward to reading Waldman's debut novel soon, as well as anything she may publish in the future.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and W. W. Norton for the e-ARC of this book. I have every intention of purchasing a physical copy when it is released next year.
October 20, 2023
Adelle Waldman was a great book. You hit the nail on the head on what goes on when you work at a big box store. I really connected with the characters. I felt like I knew some of them. So many different personalities working together day in and day out. Sometimes fun times and other times hard times. There is always a lot of politics when you want to move up in the store. You clock in and out each day and the fun starts again. Highly recommend.
February 29, 2024
From first to last page, I was strapped in, attuned to the workers at Town Square, the discount big box store in the struggling, downsized town of Potterstown in upstate New York. This particular breed of story is timely and yet commonly overlooked in much of literature. It concerns store-level employees in contemporary times. If it sounds plain for a story, you’re out to lunch! This is a spicy, savory slice of several lives, folks we meet everyday but often don’t realize.
The diagrammed graph of the main and subordinate characters at the front of the first pages gave me pause---I wondered how I would keep all these people straight, differentiated. Well, Amy Waldman did that for me. Her characters are so distinct and leap-worthy off the pages that I had no problem separating and identifying each and every coworker, boss, and executive. Even if this novel gets a big publishing boost, I would hail it as a sleeper. I didn’t know that I would be in its grip from start to finish. The crackle, the subterfuge! It’s truly hard to put down!
Once you open to page one, you’re locked down for the ride. The plot is seemingly simple. A staff promotion dangles for the daring or deserving worker bee at Town Square, putting sauce in the synergy of a big box team. The quirky or enfant terrible side of the devious parlance keeps us fastened to the story. The crew wants to engineer the outcome, steering the direction for their own choice of boss. That takes teamwork and strategy for the haul of several weeks.
Defiance, opposition, and dog-eat-dog—as well as touching support that coworkers can demonstrate, rise to the surface of hearts and minds, and sometimes clings to the shallow and fallow, too. Waldman has a knack for illuminating an individual’s favorable assets as well as the dark side of cleverness. I was as invested in their lives as they were in their own chicanery. For them, it was a matter of survival.
HELP WANTED is an ensemble comedic drama. The plot moves at a game clip, and serves to intensify the characters and themes. Is your stature at work important to how you measure your worth? How DO you measure your worth, and what kind of future do you want, v. what you think you are supposed to need? How can you jettison your impediments, and does your past determine your future? Can you overcome your regrets?
Town Square prides itself on their diversity and progressiveness. But there’s demand to steady the times—to cut costs, eliminate overtime, and reduce staffing levels.
This isn’t one of those momentous novels about changing or saving the world; rather, it’s about the world as it is, about human relations, and a big peek into the retail industry. I worked retail right after I got out of high school---back in the Flintstone era, and though technology has changed the process, the human side remains the same. We are all just people, trying to get along, or ahead, or just pursing a steady pay. HELP WANTED is a blast and a half, touching, tender, and tenacious.
Thank you to Norton for sending me a finished copy for review. I would not have known to select this for myself. Sometimes, others know our strengths in reading, too! This book reads swiftly and is certainly timely.
4.5+
The diagrammed graph of the main and subordinate characters at the front of the first pages gave me pause---I wondered how I would keep all these people straight, differentiated. Well, Amy Waldman did that for me. Her characters are so distinct and leap-worthy off the pages that I had no problem separating and identifying each and every coworker, boss, and executive. Even if this novel gets a big publishing boost, I would hail it as a sleeper. I didn’t know that I would be in its grip from start to finish. The crackle, the subterfuge! It’s truly hard to put down!
Once you open to page one, you’re locked down for the ride. The plot is seemingly simple. A staff promotion dangles for the daring or deserving worker bee at Town Square, putting sauce in the synergy of a big box team. The quirky or enfant terrible side of the devious parlance keeps us fastened to the story. The crew wants to engineer the outcome, steering the direction for their own choice of boss. That takes teamwork and strategy for the haul of several weeks.
Defiance, opposition, and dog-eat-dog—as well as touching support that coworkers can demonstrate, rise to the surface of hearts and minds, and sometimes clings to the shallow and fallow, too. Waldman has a knack for illuminating an individual’s favorable assets as well as the dark side of cleverness. I was as invested in their lives as they were in their own chicanery. For them, it was a matter of survival.
HELP WANTED is an ensemble comedic drama. The plot moves at a game clip, and serves to intensify the characters and themes. Is your stature at work important to how you measure your worth? How DO you measure your worth, and what kind of future do you want, v. what you think you are supposed to need? How can you jettison your impediments, and does your past determine your future? Can you overcome your regrets?
Town Square prides itself on their diversity and progressiveness. But there’s demand to steady the times—to cut costs, eliminate overtime, and reduce staffing levels.
This isn’t one of those momentous novels about changing or saving the world; rather, it’s about the world as it is, about human relations, and a big peek into the retail industry. I worked retail right after I got out of high school---back in the Flintstone era, and though technology has changed the process, the human side remains the same. We are all just people, trying to get along, or ahead, or just pursing a steady pay. HELP WANTED is a blast and a half, touching, tender, and tenacious.
Thank you to Norton for sending me a finished copy for review. I would not have known to select this for myself. Sometimes, others know our strengths in reading, too! This book reads swiftly and is certainly timely.
4.5+
April 25, 2024
3.5 This book took me back to my early twenties when I worked, and I’m going to date myself here, at a newly opened Turnstyle. Does anyone remember those stores? Anyway, I could identify with the group Movement in this novel, with the truck on loading, time crunches and the feelings of these employees. A boss that isn’t well liked, not sufficient at their job, feeling under appreciated, overworked and frustrated with the hours or lack of.
This book hits the nail on the head, so to speak, as we get to learn about the employees of the Movement group and their backstories. Their plots to improve their lives through a group decision on the way they can improve their job. There is some dark, ironic humor and it compels one to keep reading to see how their plotting will turn out.
I listened to the audio which was well done.
This book hits the nail on the head, so to speak, as we get to learn about the employees of the Movement group and their backstories. Their plots to improve their lives through a group decision on the way they can improve their job. There is some dark, ironic humor and it compels one to keep reading to see how their plotting will turn out.
I listened to the audio which was well done.
March 30, 2024
Help Wanted follows a group of employees on the Movement team at a big box store in upstate NY. They clock in at 3:55 AM to unload the daily delivery of shipments and re-stock the store before it opens at 8 AM.
Their department boss is incompetent and when the store manager announces he’s leaving, the Movement team members strategize internally, and with each other, about who would be the best fit to replace him, and how that would impact their work life. Many of the team members have second jobs, personal struggles, and family obligations they’re dealing with outside of work too.
While I’ve never worked in retail, this book felt realistic in both workplace expectations and social dynamics. I was intrigued when I initially heard about Help Wanted and enjoyed it more than I expected to.
Their department boss is incompetent and when the store manager announces he’s leaving, the Movement team members strategize internally, and with each other, about who would be the best fit to replace him, and how that would impact their work life. Many of the team members have second jobs, personal struggles, and family obligations they’re dealing with outside of work too.
While I’ve never worked in retail, this book felt realistic in both workplace expectations and social dynamics. I was intrigued when I initially heard about Help Wanted and enjoyed it more than I expected to.
April 9, 2024
As a person who worked retail for a number of years, I really wanted to like Help Wanted. After finishing it, I'm left wondering who this book is for. It certainly paints a realistic picture of what life is like working a job like that, but those who have worked a job with shitty hours, unreliable schedule, on their feet all day, for low pay probably don't need to read a blow-by-blow of what it's like and those who haven't probably aren't interested in bland descriptions of said work.
Every character in the book felt more or less the same. All of them were people with potential who felt they'd never met it, with exactly one kid at home, who barely (but still) scraped by working a part-time job while living with their parents. Without any substantive differences in the characters, you weren't really rooting for anyone. The structural choice to float meanderingly from perspective to perspective gave the book an untethered feeling that exacerbated that lack of connection to the characters. I appreciate the fact that Waldman included some very real details in the story, especially the truly mad drive to receive a full-time job in one of these places but ultimately it fell flat. The descriptions of post-Amazon retail were spot-on but not really interesting in regards to the narrative.
I read a lot of press about how Waldman chose to go work in a big box store and that that was the inspiration for Help Wanted but after reading this story, the whole endeavor reads more as a fancy lady playacting as a poor person and less as an in-depth assesment of the lives of the working class, a la Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. Altogether, this was a disappointment for me.
Every character in the book felt more or less the same. All of them were people with potential who felt they'd never met it, with exactly one kid at home, who barely (but still) scraped by working a part-time job while living with their parents. Without any substantive differences in the characters, you weren't really rooting for anyone. The structural choice to float meanderingly from perspective to perspective gave the book an untethered feeling that exacerbated that lack of connection to the characters. I appreciate the fact that Waldman included some very real details in the story, especially the truly mad drive to receive a full-time job in one of these places but ultimately it fell flat. The descriptions of post-Amazon retail were spot-on but not really interesting in regards to the narrative.
I read a lot of press about how Waldman chose to go work in a big box store and that that was the inspiration for Help Wanted but after reading this story, the whole endeavor reads more as a fancy lady playacting as a poor person and less as an in-depth assesment of the lives of the working class, a la Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. Altogether, this was a disappointment for me.
March 24, 2024
This great little book was something like a “Cats” of Target or “A Chorus Line” of Walmart, but quieter.
If you’ve seen the musical, you’ll know that “A Chorus Line” is about an audition with a somewhat unempathic director for eight coveted spots in… well, a chorus line, that are desperately needed for various reasons by about twice as many candidates, who all have fascinating backstories and particular strengths and weaknesses. This book is kind of like that, only instead of a Broadway musical chorus, the stage in question is a big box retail store, the job an internal promotion to a retail department supervisor role, and the director lording over the tryouts and everyone’s fate is mid-level retail management.
Or maybe “Cats” is the better comparison in this case. In that musical, a number of … well, cats, also with interesting and varied histories, talents, shortcomings, and needs, are all vying for a once-in-a-lifetime elevation to The Heaviside Layer, presumably a reincarnation beyond the ninth life that will lead to better things for a cat. What makes “Cats” like this book is that, union-style, both the cats and the retail employees sort of put themselves in charge of determining who among their crew is most deserving and worthy of the promotion.
In either case - this book is just as excellent as either musical and likewise accomplishes a wonderful feat of illuminating the lives of unique and precious, often overlooked, beings among us.
If you’ve seen the musical, you’ll know that “A Chorus Line” is about an audition with a somewhat unempathic director for eight coveted spots in… well, a chorus line, that are desperately needed for various reasons by about twice as many candidates, who all have fascinating backstories and particular strengths and weaknesses. This book is kind of like that, only instead of a Broadway musical chorus, the stage in question is a big box retail store, the job an internal promotion to a retail department supervisor role, and the director lording over the tryouts and everyone’s fate is mid-level retail management.
Or maybe “Cats” is the better comparison in this case. In that musical, a number of … well, cats, also with interesting and varied histories, talents, shortcomings, and needs, are all vying for a once-in-a-lifetime elevation to The Heaviside Layer, presumably a reincarnation beyond the ninth life that will lead to better things for a cat. What makes “Cats” like this book is that, union-style, both the cats and the retail employees sort of put themselves in charge of determining who among their crew is most deserving and worthy of the promotion.
In either case - this book is just as excellent as either musical and likewise accomplishes a wonderful feat of illuminating the lives of unique and precious, often overlooked, beings among us.
April 22, 2024
2.5. You know those episodes of Seinfeld where the entire 30 minutes took place in the Chinese restaurant and the parking garage? That’s how this felt to me except it was a 9-hour audiobook. There just wasn’t enough plot to fill an entire novel, about who should get a promotion at a big box store. I was often bored and when I tuned out I didn’t seem to miss much. There was no big validation or highlights for these characters. Unfortunately dull. Don’t know if reading versus listening would have made a difference. 🎧
March 10, 2024
4 Stars
Read
January 13, 2025The novel is about hourly employees working in a big box store. We learn about their personal situations as well as how they are being exploited by management. They earn minimum wage and work physical and mind-numbing jobs. They are the working poor.
Unfortunately, the book has become repetitive and dull. I have decided to stop reading at 65 pages in.
Unfortunately, the book has become repetitive and dull. I have decided to stop reading at 65 pages in.
December 14, 2025
An entire book that embodies the spirit of the famous Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness." - Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
Help Wanted perfectly captures the soul-crushing experience of trying to survive in an economy designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, block labour action, and limit opportunities for advancement. Adelle Waldman understands the fake-friendly corporate mechanisms pitting worker against worker, reducing human lives to entries that can be deleted from a spreadsheet. She's worked short-term big box store jobs and has a lot of empathy for her subjects.
This novel is a reminder to the currently employed: No matter how comfortable you feel in your job right now, you are always closer to the employees in this story than you will ever be to any billionaire or politician.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness." - Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
Help Wanted perfectly captures the soul-crushing experience of trying to survive in an economy designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, block labour action, and limit opportunities for advancement. Adelle Waldman understands the fake-friendly corporate mechanisms pitting worker against worker, reducing human lives to entries that can be deleted from a spreadsheet. She's worked short-term big box store jobs and has a lot of empathy for her subjects.
This novel is a reminder to the currently employed: No matter how comfortable you feel in your job right now, you are always closer to the employees in this story than you will ever be to any billionaire or politician.
January 16, 2024
I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway in exchange for an honest review. This book was ok. Not a favorite. I've worked in places like this so the characters and the plot have complete realism. I worked in assembly factories my whole life, both union and non union and the plot holds true to both instances. Maybe since I worked and lived this story I found it really really boring. The over descriptive dialog of each character took away from the story not helped it. I already knew these characters because after 50 years in the workforce I worked with every single one of them. Maybe I'm just biased because of that fact. The long hours, the unfairness to the employees, the favoritism it all rang true however. It was a good attempt at a first write, it just could have been less boring. You can try it if you like. But personally I felt like it just was a big waste of time and not entertain. I just don't see what all the hype is about this book. A solid C- of a book.
July 23, 2024
I’m actually surprised that I read the whole thing. The characters and “plot twists” (and I use the phrase lightly) were organic and believable. However, no single character was worth rooting for. The book is written entirely in 3rd person, limited omniscience. Each character has their own backstory. However, the backstories have minimal impact on the present story being told. I suppose I was expecting a sitcom-like, quipped adventure full of mishaps, comical blunders, and Shakespearean dramatic irony. What I got was a smokers tale about how they got passed over for a middle management job. No uplifting ending. No endearing characters. No shocking twist. An overall disappointment.
December 30, 2023
This is a story about the employees of a big box store. A job promotion has become available and they are either vying for the job or trying to sabotage others. I didn’t feel like most of the reviewers of this book. To me it was extremely sad the way the workers were treated and how they sometimes treated each other.
March 18, 2024
This highvquality audio centers on the day yi day running if a big box store in a deprived area. The characters are well written and th.e narration delivered flourlessly. The story deals with a lot of tough day to day ussuses including stereotyping,racism and prejudices. What i loved was the chatacters came together fir a common goal and their lives interwoven and diffucult issuses are tackled through infirmed dualogue. Thisxwas a feel good story that was trye yo life. A short entertaining listeninh. Thank you netgallery and publisher and author and narrator for thus 4 star liaten.
December 8, 2025
There are not many books Help Wanted that focus on the work lives of people in unglamorous low-pay jobs in a way that both feels very individual to the characters she creates but also as if it is about the system as a whole. I found myself constantly thinking and challenged as I read the book—and I expect to be continuing to think about it for some time to come. As an economist I wish I had better answers for the problems it depicts, which are not just about low pay but also about low and unpredictable hours.
The book is about the “movement” unit (i.e., logistics, doing things like unloading trucks starting at 4am) in a big box store that is a few notches upscale from Walmart. It depicts several workers and three levels of managers above them—plus eventually an appearance by “corporate”. None of the management is particularly villainous. Even corporate is genuinely constrained by the competition from the rise of an unnamed online retailer based in Seattle. The problem is much more about the system than it is any individual.
Of course I can resort to my economic training to interpret some things differently than the author does. For example, at one point there is what sounds like a negative implication about how the online retailer can compete: “The online retailer could do that because it didn’t need to locate its warehouses in the kinds of places where its best customers lived—it put them in areas that had been bleeding jobs for years, where people were grateful for any work at all, no matter how taxing and low-paid.” I think it’s actually a good thing that jobs are being created in areas with less opportunity and employment, but still one person’s advancement can be another person’s competition.
It is not, of course, an economics book. The book portrays about eight characters at the non-supervisory level, all of whom come to life as individuals with backstories, aspirations, humor, nuance, jokes, frustrations, and more (sometimes it felt like too many characters). Plus no condescension or melodrama.
Now I want more books like Help Wanted.
The book is about the “movement” unit (i.e., logistics, doing things like unloading trucks starting at 4am) in a big box store that is a few notches upscale from Walmart. It depicts several workers and three levels of managers above them—plus eventually an appearance by “corporate”. None of the management is particularly villainous. Even corporate is genuinely constrained by the competition from the rise of an unnamed online retailer based in Seattle. The problem is much more about the system than it is any individual.
Of course I can resort to my economic training to interpret some things differently than the author does. For example, at one point there is what sounds like a negative implication about how the online retailer can compete: “The online retailer could do that because it didn’t need to locate its warehouses in the kinds of places where its best customers lived—it put them in areas that had been bleeding jobs for years, where people were grateful for any work at all, no matter how taxing and low-paid.” I think it’s actually a good thing that jobs are being created in areas with less opportunity and employment, but still one person’s advancement can be another person’s competition.
It is not, of course, an economics book. The book portrays about eight characters at the non-supervisory level, all of whom come to life as individuals with backstories, aspirations, humor, nuance, jokes, frustrations, and more (sometimes it felt like too many characters). Plus no condescension or melodrama.
Now I want more books like Help Wanted.
February 21, 2024
I worked in the same business, if around the time that Reagan was first elected, and even though the Target-like department store in depressed upstate New York State competes with a certain unnamed "online retailer" in a very changed industry, the stories of low-wage, struggling employees doing unloading of shipments from four until eight each morning resonates. The author's one of the "city people" who've driven up housing prices as the blighted Potterstown (a sly allusion; read Poughkeepsie or Binghamton) with a quaint, if hollowed out downtown, turns a destination for Catskills-adjacent "weekenders." This backdrop is barely sketched, but as the novel's gushing blurbs from fellow denizens with second or newly refurbished first homes a couple hours north of Brooklyn or Manhattan concur, Waldman does her darnedest to channel the voices of those who've been shunted aside by the elites who move factories to foreign countries, eagerly usher in automation, and make sure to pay workers 39 hours/week at most so as to avoid benefits and health care. The enterprise grinds down those raising kids, living in mom's basement, getting out of prison, striving to pass the GED, and battling emotional, psychological, mental, and/or physical damage.
The story roams between an omniscient narrative and indirect first-person voices of a half-dozen or so of the logistics crew who handle the deliveries to the store's back warehouse. This drags the pace. Too many of the characters lack distinctive enough features to differentiate them effectively. It'd have flowed more convincingly if dialogue rather than interior monologue predominated. Wildman attempts to combine a plot about individual ambition and collective action as the Movement collude to conspire to influence the decision to promote from within to the ranks of store manager, with its enticements of steady hours, higher pay, insurance, and the basic perks abandoned by most corporations over the past few decades. The plot unfolds gradually, and its telling doesn't falter. Even if its execution stumbles into a denouement which stqggers.
This experiment smacks of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed investigation of the previous generation, who came of age as the postwar abundance shriveled into stagflation, NAFTA, globalization, and the fraying of the safety net for the working poor and the working classes. She signed on to hourly-waged jobs cleaning motels, waiting on tables, and dealing with customers as hard up as she chose to make roleplay. But like Waldman, this twist on acting out a proletarian peon rather than posing as an "Undercover Boss" carries its airs of make-believe, like an undercover detective who clocks out and sleeps soundly in a more comfortable bed. Still, Waldman with an ear for witty puteowns, snarky goldbricking {if not as easily carried out in an era of scanners, security cameras, and Stakhanovite production pressures) manages to convey the few ups and many downs of those in flyover country, where the IBM plant sprawls abandoned and where its either toiling for Town Square Inc.(i.e., Target in all but name), the even more parsimonious Walmart, fast food, or a UnitedHealthCare call center. This panorama of barely fictionalized post-industrial, zero-hour scheduling, and MBA suite euphemisms seeps into the frigid pre-dawns where these struggles multiply.
The story roams between an omniscient narrative and indirect first-person voices of a half-dozen or so of the logistics crew who handle the deliveries to the store's back warehouse. This drags the pace. Too many of the characters lack distinctive enough features to differentiate them effectively. It'd have flowed more convincingly if dialogue rather than interior monologue predominated. Wildman attempts to combine a plot about individual ambition and collective action as the Movement collude to conspire to influence the decision to promote from within to the ranks of store manager, with its enticements of steady hours, higher pay, insurance, and the basic perks abandoned by most corporations over the past few decades. The plot unfolds gradually, and its telling doesn't falter. Even if its execution stumbles into a denouement which stqggers.
This experiment smacks of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed investigation of the previous generation, who came of age as the postwar abundance shriveled into stagflation, NAFTA, globalization, and the fraying of the safety net for the working poor and the working classes. She signed on to hourly-waged jobs cleaning motels, waiting on tables, and dealing with customers as hard up as she chose to make roleplay. But like Waldman, this twist on acting out a proletarian peon rather than posing as an "Undercover Boss" carries its airs of make-believe, like an undercover detective who clocks out and sleeps soundly in a more comfortable bed. Still, Waldman with an ear for witty puteowns, snarky goldbricking {if not as easily carried out in an era of scanners, security cameras, and Stakhanovite production pressures) manages to convey the few ups and many downs of those in flyover country, where the IBM plant sprawls abandoned and where its either toiling for Town Square Inc.(i.e., Target in all but name), the even more parsimonious Walmart, fast food, or a UnitedHealthCare call center. This panorama of barely fictionalized post-industrial, zero-hour scheduling, and MBA suite euphemisms seeps into the frigid pre-dawns where these struggles multiply.
March 21, 2024
Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman's second novel, has been compared to a certain kind of nineteenth-century English classic, and I can see it. Like upstairs-downstairs novels, Waldman depicts a microcosm of society within a single branch of a US superstore, Town Square, that prides itself on being better quality than Walmart, but is slowly sliding down the rungs due to competition from Amazon (American readers seem to think Town Square is an approximation of Target, and I bow to their superior knowledge). Our protagonists work in 'Movement', unloading trucks every morning then breaking out boxes on the shop floor. They are forced to take part-time hours, with no access to health insurance or overtime, even though there's always more work to do, and they are harassed by unsympathetic manager Meredith. When a more senior position opens up at the store, the team realise that if Meredith gets promoted, she'll be out of their hair - and this might also offer some of them a chance to move up the ladder - so the plotting begins.
I was honestly fascinated by the inner workings of this superstore alone, and the intricate knowledge that the older workers have of unloading its products, so I was absorbed in Help Wanted from page one. However, if you're not quite as keen on getting a glimpse inside Target, the main attraction of this novel is its cast. Once again drawing from nineteenth-century attitudes to fiction, Waldman is determined that no character, even Meredith, should be portrayed as wholly good or bad. All have their complexities, and all are aware of the hierarchies they sit in both inside and outside the store. Inevitably, certain characters come through more than others. Travis and Raymond were blurry for me, Ruby cliched, Diego, Val and Nicole clearer. For my money, though, Waldman's best creation is Milo, a goofy middle-aged man who acts as the 'thrower' at the warehouse, chucking products onto the line for the others to sort, and enjoys choosing the order carefully to tell a story: 'Milo began dramatising the human life cycle. He pushed out boxes of baby food and powdered formula... six sets of Candy Land... a children's bike... a Nintendo Switch... cans of Red Bull... Adulthood - a letdown in Milo's estimation - was a set of pots and pans, a box of Tide Pods, an alarm clock...' Milo is one of those men who monologues at women he's interested in, but Waldman gives this a sympathetic and insightful reading: 'It wasn't that Milo wasn't interested in what Callie had to say... Milo cut her off because he took for granted that she was accomplished and desirable. He instinctively felt it was incumbent on him to prove himself to her'.
As this quote suggests, Waldman's writing can be a tad clunky, and I wanted a slightly more dramatic final act than we got, but then again, that might be the point - in the cyclical world of Town Square, there is never really any escape. There's just more stuff coming down the conveyor belt.
I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.
I was honestly fascinated by the inner workings of this superstore alone, and the intricate knowledge that the older workers have of unloading its products, so I was absorbed in Help Wanted from page one. However, if you're not quite as keen on getting a glimpse inside Target, the main attraction of this novel is its cast. Once again drawing from nineteenth-century attitudes to fiction, Waldman is determined that no character, even Meredith, should be portrayed as wholly good or bad. All have their complexities, and all are aware of the hierarchies they sit in both inside and outside the store. Inevitably, certain characters come through more than others. Travis and Raymond were blurry for me, Ruby cliched, Diego, Val and Nicole clearer. For my money, though, Waldman's best creation is Milo, a goofy middle-aged man who acts as the 'thrower' at the warehouse, chucking products onto the line for the others to sort, and enjoys choosing the order carefully to tell a story: 'Milo began dramatising the human life cycle. He pushed out boxes of baby food and powdered formula... six sets of Candy Land... a children's bike... a Nintendo Switch... cans of Red Bull... Adulthood - a letdown in Milo's estimation - was a set of pots and pans, a box of Tide Pods, an alarm clock...' Milo is one of those men who monologues at women he's interested in, but Waldman gives this a sympathetic and insightful reading: 'It wasn't that Milo wasn't interested in what Callie had to say... Milo cut her off because he took for granted that she was accomplished and desirable. He instinctively felt it was incumbent on him to prove himself to her'.
As this quote suggests, Waldman's writing can be a tad clunky, and I wanted a slightly more dramatic final act than we got, but then again, that might be the point - in the cyclical world of Town Square, there is never really any escape. There's just more stuff coming down the conveyor belt.
I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.
April 26, 2024
Adelle Waldman has lately been in a situation that other writers both envy and fear: she’s released a long-awaited follow-up to a remarkably successful first novel.
Waldman is the author of 2013’s much-imitated The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., a story about literary types living in Brooklyn that earned the love of both that type of person and those who who love to hate them. The book’s great accomplishment was an exquisitely-tuned sense of authorial judgment, one which frequently lampooned the pretension and lack of self-knowledge of its self-important characters while never seeming to take the easy way out by making caricatures of them. The titular Nathaniel P. is possessed of an infuriating and remarkably true-to-life combination of outsized self-regard and perpetual insecurity. His burgeoning success as a writer makes him enviable to his peers, and yet every step he takes up the ladder leaves him more consumed with the feelings of inadequacy that he’s working hard to hide. Nate gets himself into a series of awkward situations, thanks to the titular love affairs, his elevated ambitions, and the various petty jealousies of his peers. Like any comedy of manners, Nathaniel P succeeded as well as it did because it was both a portrait of a very specific time and timeless. The novel was a reflection of a small, self-obsessed slice of humanity; the NYT review stressed how Nate cut a familiar figure. Yet you leave the novel understanding that its characters were simply playing the same games people have always played.
Nate and his peers are subject to some pretty blistering satire, much of it owing to Nate’s inability to process anyone else’s feelings without running them through the filter of his own. Yet the digs never feel personal. To make a weird comparison, Waldman’s narrative perspective in Nathaniel P. reminds me of Freud writing about his patients: there are all the parts common to judging, but there is no judgment, only clinical observation.
If that all sounds Discourse-y, you’re right! I’m sure there’s already readers scrambling to the comments to say that this all sounds insufferable. Nathaniel P. generated a mountain of coverage for two dovetailing reasons: it described a kind of person that many people love to hate while inspiring feelings of queasy self-identification among people who would like to think they could never be a Nate P. In a typical scene, he’s either doing something that’s unlikable or demonstrating the kind of self-consciousness about status and appearance that many of us find viscerally annoying even when not doing anything else wrong. Nate has hit upon recent success as a writer that has made him more desirable in the sexual marketplace of literary Brooklyn, and while he’s not a predator, he’s also all too aware of his newfound powers. He is, in other words, a member of that reviled but essential category, the unlikable protagonist. And a lot of people just inherently struggle with that; I know people who love books and are sophisticated readers who will just tell you straight out that they can’t handle unsympathetic protagonists. But, while Nathan is frequently irritating, and a number of his relationships are insincere and transactional, and I’m glad he’s not dating my sister, he’s never sinister. He just doesn’t know how to pursue what he wants romantically and sexually after being socialized into a world where feminist norms have taught him more about what he must not do than what he should do.
In any event, Nathaniel P. was a sensation; it also described a world that was already just about dead by the time it was released. Certainly there are still annoying literary types in Brooklyn and elsewhere. But the much-mocked “hipster” archetype hung around as a punching bag far longer than the actual organic social scene it described. By 2013 Williamsburg had already become a ludicrously pricey playground for uncool types with too much money who were chasing the fumes of the prior decade’s moment or rich parents who needed convenient L train access to Manhattan. The people who had made up the scene had mostly all gone on to lucrative jobs in the square world and started families or had been forced to decamp for cheaper climes. The opening of the Williamsburg Whole Foods in 2016 has been represented by some as the final nail in the coffin for what “Williamsburg” had once meant, which is annoying but not untrue. That was, somehow, almost eight years ago, and since then we’ve had Bernie’s effect on young people’s politics, and President Trump, and MeToo, and Covid19, and George Floyd…. It’s been a long time for new cultural touchstones to emerge, and anyway, I doubt Waldman had any interest in mining that territory again. Which is why I say that, in publishing her new novel Help Wanted, Waldman is in a position that’s both enviable and scary - a very successful first novel launches a career, and it’s also something to live up to.
The characters in Help Wanted are about as far from the concerns of 2000s literary Brooklynites as you might imagine, though those groups are closer in income than some in the latter world would like to let on. Help Wanted tells the story of the interlocking lives of workers at a big box store called Town Square. The book chronicles the various challenges of a diverse cast of characters who work in logistics, the behind-the-scenes busywork that makes that sort of mammoth store function, principally the endless tasks of receiving trucks, unloading them, breaking down boxes of items, helping ensure that those items are inventoried and tracked in the company’s system, and getting them to the right shelf, by itself an immense amount of work. (Some of Walmart’s “supercenters” take up as much as 250,000 square feet.) There are a variety of characters in the team, some of whom take up more of our attention than others, principally Little Will, whose name is not a comment on his physical stature but rather to distinguish him in the Byzantine hierarchy of Town Square. (The average Target probably has about 200 or so employees, although such jobs are highly seasonal, which factors into the plot of Help Wanted.) But there is no one main character here, which befits the book’s interest in the fundamental averageness of what it depicts. The book has a polemical side, and yet there’s something soothing about its relentless mundanity.
Not to fixate too much on the first book, but this distributed protagonist setup is clearly another way Help Wanted breaks from its predecessor: though told in third person, Nate’s consciousness is suffocating in Nathaniel P. How he’s feeling is everywhere you turn, which is where the critique comes in; Nate is a not-bad guy who cannot comprehend the degree to which he casts other people as roles in the movie in his head. In Help Wanted the focus is on systems, most obviously the store as a large system of interlocking points, and also on America’s class system, and so on. Another is the way that the perspectives of these people, who know each other only by necessity, intersect and overlap and function as a team. Which brings us to the plot, not just as in “the book’s plot” but in regards to the plot hatched by the characters. Driven to distraction by their casually vindictive new boss Meredith, the logistics team settle on a funny and bittersweet way to get rid of her: get her promoted. They work together on this task with the same sort of exhausted determination that they bring to their work at Town Square. (As is commonly the case in real life, these workers arrive before 4AM, given how much has to be unpacked and sorted prior to the arrival of customers.) Getting rid of their adversary by helping her advance even farther over their heads in the business is a grimly comic encapsulation of what Help Wanted is all about. And it’s a good note to help understand that the book is frequently quietly outraged at the treatment of these low-waged workers, but knows how to have fun.
It’s a book filled with grace notes. The corporate decision to change the name of the team that unloads trucks and gets items onto shelves to “Team Movement” is pitch-perfect; it’s exactly the kind of sunny gloss management likes to put on drudgery. I suppose you could also call it a little on the nose - the people in Team Movement, after all, are stuck, stuck in a shitty job, stuck in bad relationships, stuck in addiction, stuck in debt. But the book simply wouldn’t work if it didn’t effectively satirize the mandatory positivity that this kind of business enforces on its workers, and none of those notes rang false for me. And there’s something admirable about themes being as unguarded as they frequently are in Help Wanted. One of Town Square’s cast of characters is a former star college athlete who had dreams of something bigger, only to find himself in a job that he very recently would have found beneath him. The commonplace of fleeting athletic success and the person shellshocked by losing it is a very simple and unfussy microcosm of the big mass of dashed dreams that the Town Square workers quietly mourn. I appreciate how direct it all is.
I think my favorite element of Help Wanted is the procedural elements of big box store life, the actual work. I’m someone who’s addicted to YouTube videos that demonstrate process, even processes that produce outcomes that are not interesting to me. I watch a lot of videos teaching how to cook particular dishes; I like to cook, but usually I’m not watching to learn myself but just to watch someone do something that involves a lot of intricate steps. I enjoy videos about repairing retro computers, making wooden furniture, and grooming dogs for the same reason. Help Wanted gives you a good bit of exposure to the work that goes on behind the scenes at one of these giant stores, with a sense of how intricate all of it really is. It makes sense, when you think about it, to devote time to the way that items manufactured in China a few weeks earlier and sent across the ocean in giant container ships come to be in the exact right spot in the exact right aisle, sorted just above where the right little faded price sticker sits. After all, these stores largely prefer to keep that hidden work hidden. The sheer number of products sold at a Target or Walmart or Costco is so immense, and the need to put them in places where customers can find them so obvious, that it’s odd to think that most of us know so little about the logistical challenges involved.
So, what didn’t I like. Well, I do think that while the distributed narrative attention is necessary for the book to make the points it’s making, there is at times a scattershot feeling when it comes to who we’re following and why. Sometimes I just wanted to follow one character and was annoyed to find that I had to read about two others to get back to that one. And (as was inevitable) not all of the characters feel as filled-out and lived as others. The diversity of the characters and their points of view is a real strength, and it’s precisely the kind of plot-dependent and unfussy diversity that has the most value, but there can be a box-checking feeling to this element. You know there’s going to be a single mother struggling to keep her kid on the right track as she hustles to pay the rent, and sure enough there is. While they’re filled with flaws, Waldman clearly has affection for the workers at Town Square, and perhaps perhaps perhaps they are at times a little too noble for the novel’s good.
Which points towards a whole discussion about authorial relationships to character, here in the 21st century, that I’d love to skip but feel like I can’t. As you know, I am exceedingly unimpressed with the concept of cultural appropriation, which seeks to render impermissible that process which underlies all human creation. I’m sure some people on Tumblr or Twitter are yammering about how Waldman is telling a story that isn’t hers to tell, but honestly, who cares. (If there is no effort to bridge social distance by imagining the lives of others, there is no such thing as the American novel.) Still, there’s some fertile ground to be had comparing Waldman’s first novel to her new one, and I would be lying if I said that Help Wanted never had me feeling a little apprehensive. I think the book’s intense focus on the plight of characters who exist in a different social strata than Waldman - a difference that is more cultural than economic, but economic too - can’t help but provoke concerns about lifestyle voyeurism. But then that’s an inevitable function of today’ complicated rules about depiction and appropriation and similar. I guess you might say that Waldman’s affection towards her characters is both authentic and, on a meta level, self-defensive. Waldman thinks well of her characters in Help Wanted, but their relative social position means that she’s constrained in how she depicts them - she likes them, but is unwilling to dislike them the way she disliked those in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., whom she may not have liked but certainly understood.
This is the paradox of the egalitarian’s view from above. Waldman’s respect for her working-class characters is obvious and sincere, as evidenced by the text itself and by this profile in The Cut. What nagged at me over the course of the novel was the sense that her generosity towards her big-box worker characters only reinforces the class divide between them. Nathaniel P’s characters were periodically skewered, and while that treatment may have been cutting, it also implies a certain level of equality between author and character. Nathaniel P’s annoying literary types are satirized because they are seen as legitimate targets and legitimate targets because they are on Waldman’s level. Help Wanted’s characters, with the exception of the villainous Meredith - a woman who is sometimes diabolical but always human and tellingly, at least on some level, in a similar social rank as Waldman - are not subject to satiric critique. They make bad choices and are sometimes exasperating, but their flaws are ultimately a product of systems and circumstance. Nate, in the first novel, is allowed to just be a selfish asshole, and though we judge him we do so on his level.
Had Waldman treated her characters with the same gentle disdain as she did her characters in Nathaniel P, she would certainly have been accused of punching down. But you cannot avoid “punching down” without a confident sense of in which direction “down” lies. If you see what I mean.
The implied self-knowledge about class is fine, even essential. You don’t get rich writing the kind of books that Waldman writes, even those as widely-esteemed as Nathanial P., but certainly her strong literary reputation demonstrates various types of social capital that she simply has and the average Walmart worker simply does not. And, I stress, it would do no one any good to pretend otherwise. But the fact is that the characters in Waldman’s first book, though frequently unsympathetic, were characters Waldman was… willing to render unsympathetic. She is largely not willing when it comes to the characters in her second, who are sometimes self-sabotaging and who do some unpleasant things but whom you as a reader reflexively sympathize with, and in there somewhere is a dissertation on American class relations. The whole book is intimately and inextricably sewn through with productive class tensions and nods to various markers of income and wealth. I’ve seen several people online commenting that Town Square is more like a fictional Target than like a fictional Walmart, and though this likely means little for workers, there’s always been a sense in which Target is the store for the upper class of the lower classes. You don’t get to explore those issues without diving into differences in class. All I’m suggesting is that the book’s relationship towards its own characters is, in its own way, another expression of those differences.
Of course, were this a brutal satire of people making $12.50 an hour, that would present its own problems, worse ones. It’s not an easy square to circle. And there’s been many ham-handed attempts to dramatize the lives of those in lower class strata, in the past. I often think of movies from the 1990s in which, in a bid to demonstrate how not-racist they were, filmmakers portrayed an endless array of impossibly noble Black men characters; obviously, these characters were not actually an alternative to racism but an expression of it. They were always in some sense powerless, sexless. (The virtuous Black man in the 1991 weeper Fried Green Tomatoes is literally mute.) Waldman is of course nothing like this crude, and indeed, this is the heart of Help Wanted, the sketching of characters who are both sympathetic and flawed, whose problems are ultimately structural problems of the kind of people that get left behind in our system. I don’t think Waldman has pulled off the balancing act perfectly, but in fairness neither has anyone else. And you can see the dilemma - while the reaction to her first novel was overwhelmingly positive, she was criticized by some for depicting the lives of those perceived to be too privileged to pay attention to, and is now criticized for appropriating the story of those with too little privilege. I think we really don’t have the slightest idea what we want with these ideas of appropriation and identity, and Help Wanted succeeds as well as it could have, while performing the permanently-useful job of portraying people whose lives are rarely dramatized.
I am far from the first to note that Waldman could have easily just come back, after ten years, with the same kind of novel as her first, with Even More Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., another look at the mores of characters who are upper-class in their tastes and education if not in their bank accounts. Maybe this time it would have been aspiring filmmakers in Silver Lake or ambitious academics in Princeton. That book wouldn’t have sold as well as its predecessor, the New Yorker might have relegated it to the Honorable Mentions section of its annual best book list, but it would have been safe and would have sold well enough to earn a big advance on her next book and maybe somebody would have gotten a movie made out of it this time. It’s clear that, after the runaway success of The Loves of Nathaniel P., she wanted to write characters that were not like her, characters whose lives were not like hers. In ways both comfortable and not, she’s succeeded.
Waldman is the author of 2013’s much-imitated The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., a story about literary types living in Brooklyn that earned the love of both that type of person and those who who love to hate them. The book’s great accomplishment was an exquisitely-tuned sense of authorial judgment, one which frequently lampooned the pretension and lack of self-knowledge of its self-important characters while never seeming to take the easy way out by making caricatures of them. The titular Nathaniel P. is possessed of an infuriating and remarkably true-to-life combination of outsized self-regard and perpetual insecurity. His burgeoning success as a writer makes him enviable to his peers, and yet every step he takes up the ladder leaves him more consumed with the feelings of inadequacy that he’s working hard to hide. Nate gets himself into a series of awkward situations, thanks to the titular love affairs, his elevated ambitions, and the various petty jealousies of his peers. Like any comedy of manners, Nathaniel P succeeded as well as it did because it was both a portrait of a very specific time and timeless. The novel was a reflection of a small, self-obsessed slice of humanity; the NYT review stressed how Nate cut a familiar figure. Yet you leave the novel understanding that its characters were simply playing the same games people have always played.
Nate and his peers are subject to some pretty blistering satire, much of it owing to Nate’s inability to process anyone else’s feelings without running them through the filter of his own. Yet the digs never feel personal. To make a weird comparison, Waldman’s narrative perspective in Nathaniel P. reminds me of Freud writing about his patients: there are all the parts common to judging, but there is no judgment, only clinical observation.
If that all sounds Discourse-y, you’re right! I’m sure there’s already readers scrambling to the comments to say that this all sounds insufferable. Nathaniel P. generated a mountain of coverage for two dovetailing reasons: it described a kind of person that many people love to hate while inspiring feelings of queasy self-identification among people who would like to think they could never be a Nate P. In a typical scene, he’s either doing something that’s unlikable or demonstrating the kind of self-consciousness about status and appearance that many of us find viscerally annoying even when not doing anything else wrong. Nate has hit upon recent success as a writer that has made him more desirable in the sexual marketplace of literary Brooklyn, and while he’s not a predator, he’s also all too aware of his newfound powers. He is, in other words, a member of that reviled but essential category, the unlikable protagonist. And a lot of people just inherently struggle with that; I know people who love books and are sophisticated readers who will just tell you straight out that they can’t handle unsympathetic protagonists. But, while Nathan is frequently irritating, and a number of his relationships are insincere and transactional, and I’m glad he’s not dating my sister, he’s never sinister. He just doesn’t know how to pursue what he wants romantically and sexually after being socialized into a world where feminist norms have taught him more about what he must not do than what he should do.
In any event, Nathaniel P. was a sensation; it also described a world that was already just about dead by the time it was released. Certainly there are still annoying literary types in Brooklyn and elsewhere. But the much-mocked “hipster” archetype hung around as a punching bag far longer than the actual organic social scene it described. By 2013 Williamsburg had already become a ludicrously pricey playground for uncool types with too much money who were chasing the fumes of the prior decade’s moment or rich parents who needed convenient L train access to Manhattan. The people who had made up the scene had mostly all gone on to lucrative jobs in the square world and started families or had been forced to decamp for cheaper climes. The opening of the Williamsburg Whole Foods in 2016 has been represented by some as the final nail in the coffin for what “Williamsburg” had once meant, which is annoying but not untrue. That was, somehow, almost eight years ago, and since then we’ve had Bernie’s effect on young people’s politics, and President Trump, and MeToo, and Covid19, and George Floyd…. It’s been a long time for new cultural touchstones to emerge, and anyway, I doubt Waldman had any interest in mining that territory again. Which is why I say that, in publishing her new novel Help Wanted, Waldman is in a position that’s both enviable and scary - a very successful first novel launches a career, and it’s also something to live up to.
The characters in Help Wanted are about as far from the concerns of 2000s literary Brooklynites as you might imagine, though those groups are closer in income than some in the latter world would like to let on. Help Wanted tells the story of the interlocking lives of workers at a big box store called Town Square. The book chronicles the various challenges of a diverse cast of characters who work in logistics, the behind-the-scenes busywork that makes that sort of mammoth store function, principally the endless tasks of receiving trucks, unloading them, breaking down boxes of items, helping ensure that those items are inventoried and tracked in the company’s system, and getting them to the right shelf, by itself an immense amount of work. (Some of Walmart’s “supercenters” take up as much as 250,000 square feet.) There are a variety of characters in the team, some of whom take up more of our attention than others, principally Little Will, whose name is not a comment on his physical stature but rather to distinguish him in the Byzantine hierarchy of Town Square. (The average Target probably has about 200 or so employees, although such jobs are highly seasonal, which factors into the plot of Help Wanted.) But there is no one main character here, which befits the book’s interest in the fundamental averageness of what it depicts. The book has a polemical side, and yet there’s something soothing about its relentless mundanity.
Not to fixate too much on the first book, but this distributed protagonist setup is clearly another way Help Wanted breaks from its predecessor: though told in third person, Nate’s consciousness is suffocating in Nathaniel P. How he’s feeling is everywhere you turn, which is where the critique comes in; Nate is a not-bad guy who cannot comprehend the degree to which he casts other people as roles in the movie in his head. In Help Wanted the focus is on systems, most obviously the store as a large system of interlocking points, and also on America’s class system, and so on. Another is the way that the perspectives of these people, who know each other only by necessity, intersect and overlap and function as a team. Which brings us to the plot, not just as in “the book’s plot” but in regards to the plot hatched by the characters. Driven to distraction by their casually vindictive new boss Meredith, the logistics team settle on a funny and bittersweet way to get rid of her: get her promoted. They work together on this task with the same sort of exhausted determination that they bring to their work at Town Square. (As is commonly the case in real life, these workers arrive before 4AM, given how much has to be unpacked and sorted prior to the arrival of customers.) Getting rid of their adversary by helping her advance even farther over their heads in the business is a grimly comic encapsulation of what Help Wanted is all about. And it’s a good note to help understand that the book is frequently quietly outraged at the treatment of these low-waged workers, but knows how to have fun.
It’s a book filled with grace notes. The corporate decision to change the name of the team that unloads trucks and gets items onto shelves to “Team Movement” is pitch-perfect; it’s exactly the kind of sunny gloss management likes to put on drudgery. I suppose you could also call it a little on the nose - the people in Team Movement, after all, are stuck, stuck in a shitty job, stuck in bad relationships, stuck in addiction, stuck in debt. But the book simply wouldn’t work if it didn’t effectively satirize the mandatory positivity that this kind of business enforces on its workers, and none of those notes rang false for me. And there’s something admirable about themes being as unguarded as they frequently are in Help Wanted. One of Town Square’s cast of characters is a former star college athlete who had dreams of something bigger, only to find himself in a job that he very recently would have found beneath him. The commonplace of fleeting athletic success and the person shellshocked by losing it is a very simple and unfussy microcosm of the big mass of dashed dreams that the Town Square workers quietly mourn. I appreciate how direct it all is.
I think my favorite element of Help Wanted is the procedural elements of big box store life, the actual work. I’m someone who’s addicted to YouTube videos that demonstrate process, even processes that produce outcomes that are not interesting to me. I watch a lot of videos teaching how to cook particular dishes; I like to cook, but usually I’m not watching to learn myself but just to watch someone do something that involves a lot of intricate steps. I enjoy videos about repairing retro computers, making wooden furniture, and grooming dogs for the same reason. Help Wanted gives you a good bit of exposure to the work that goes on behind the scenes at one of these giant stores, with a sense of how intricate all of it really is. It makes sense, when you think about it, to devote time to the way that items manufactured in China a few weeks earlier and sent across the ocean in giant container ships come to be in the exact right spot in the exact right aisle, sorted just above where the right little faded price sticker sits. After all, these stores largely prefer to keep that hidden work hidden. The sheer number of products sold at a Target or Walmart or Costco is so immense, and the need to put them in places where customers can find them so obvious, that it’s odd to think that most of us know so little about the logistical challenges involved.
So, what didn’t I like. Well, I do think that while the distributed narrative attention is necessary for the book to make the points it’s making, there is at times a scattershot feeling when it comes to who we’re following and why. Sometimes I just wanted to follow one character and was annoyed to find that I had to read about two others to get back to that one. And (as was inevitable) not all of the characters feel as filled-out and lived as others. The diversity of the characters and their points of view is a real strength, and it’s precisely the kind of plot-dependent and unfussy diversity that has the most value, but there can be a box-checking feeling to this element. You know there’s going to be a single mother struggling to keep her kid on the right track as she hustles to pay the rent, and sure enough there is. While they’re filled with flaws, Waldman clearly has affection for the workers at Town Square, and perhaps perhaps perhaps they are at times a little too noble for the novel’s good.
Which points towards a whole discussion about authorial relationships to character, here in the 21st century, that I’d love to skip but feel like I can’t. As you know, I am exceedingly unimpressed with the concept of cultural appropriation, which seeks to render impermissible that process which underlies all human creation. I’m sure some people on Tumblr or Twitter are yammering about how Waldman is telling a story that isn’t hers to tell, but honestly, who cares. (If there is no effort to bridge social distance by imagining the lives of others, there is no such thing as the American novel.) Still, there’s some fertile ground to be had comparing Waldman’s first novel to her new one, and I would be lying if I said that Help Wanted never had me feeling a little apprehensive. I think the book’s intense focus on the plight of characters who exist in a different social strata than Waldman - a difference that is more cultural than economic, but economic too - can’t help but provoke concerns about lifestyle voyeurism. But then that’s an inevitable function of today’ complicated rules about depiction and appropriation and similar. I guess you might say that Waldman’s affection towards her characters is both authentic and, on a meta level, self-defensive. Waldman thinks well of her characters in Help Wanted, but their relative social position means that she’s constrained in how she depicts them - she likes them, but is unwilling to dislike them the way she disliked those in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., whom she may not have liked but certainly understood.
This is the paradox of the egalitarian’s view from above. Waldman’s respect for her working-class characters is obvious and sincere, as evidenced by the text itself and by this profile in The Cut. What nagged at me over the course of the novel was the sense that her generosity towards her big-box worker characters only reinforces the class divide between them. Nathaniel P’s characters were periodically skewered, and while that treatment may have been cutting, it also implies a certain level of equality between author and character. Nathaniel P’s annoying literary types are satirized because they are seen as legitimate targets and legitimate targets because they are on Waldman’s level. Help Wanted’s characters, with the exception of the villainous Meredith - a woman who is sometimes diabolical but always human and tellingly, at least on some level, in a similar social rank as Waldman - are not subject to satiric critique. They make bad choices and are sometimes exasperating, but their flaws are ultimately a product of systems and circumstance. Nate, in the first novel, is allowed to just be a selfish asshole, and though we judge him we do so on his level.
Had Waldman treated her characters with the same gentle disdain as she did her characters in Nathaniel P, she would certainly have been accused of punching down. But you cannot avoid “punching down” without a confident sense of in which direction “down” lies. If you see what I mean.
The implied self-knowledge about class is fine, even essential. You don’t get rich writing the kind of books that Waldman writes, even those as widely-esteemed as Nathanial P., but certainly her strong literary reputation demonstrates various types of social capital that she simply has and the average Walmart worker simply does not. And, I stress, it would do no one any good to pretend otherwise. But the fact is that the characters in Waldman’s first book, though frequently unsympathetic, were characters Waldman was… willing to render unsympathetic. She is largely not willing when it comes to the characters in her second, who are sometimes self-sabotaging and who do some unpleasant things but whom you as a reader reflexively sympathize with, and in there somewhere is a dissertation on American class relations. The whole book is intimately and inextricably sewn through with productive class tensions and nods to various markers of income and wealth. I’ve seen several people online commenting that Town Square is more like a fictional Target than like a fictional Walmart, and though this likely means little for workers, there’s always been a sense in which Target is the store for the upper class of the lower classes. You don’t get to explore those issues without diving into differences in class. All I’m suggesting is that the book’s relationship towards its own characters is, in its own way, another expression of those differences.
Of course, were this a brutal satire of people making $12.50 an hour, that would present its own problems, worse ones. It’s not an easy square to circle. And there’s been many ham-handed attempts to dramatize the lives of those in lower class strata, in the past. I often think of movies from the 1990s in which, in a bid to demonstrate how not-racist they were, filmmakers portrayed an endless array of impossibly noble Black men characters; obviously, these characters were not actually an alternative to racism but an expression of it. They were always in some sense powerless, sexless. (The virtuous Black man in the 1991 weeper Fried Green Tomatoes is literally mute.) Waldman is of course nothing like this crude, and indeed, this is the heart of Help Wanted, the sketching of characters who are both sympathetic and flawed, whose problems are ultimately structural problems of the kind of people that get left behind in our system. I don’t think Waldman has pulled off the balancing act perfectly, but in fairness neither has anyone else. And you can see the dilemma - while the reaction to her first novel was overwhelmingly positive, she was criticized by some for depicting the lives of those perceived to be too privileged to pay attention to, and is now criticized for appropriating the story of those with too little privilege. I think we really don’t have the slightest idea what we want with these ideas of appropriation and identity, and Help Wanted succeeds as well as it could have, while performing the permanently-useful job of portraying people whose lives are rarely dramatized.
I am far from the first to note that Waldman could have easily just come back, after ten years, with the same kind of novel as her first, with Even More Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., another look at the mores of characters who are upper-class in their tastes and education if not in their bank accounts. Maybe this time it would have been aspiring filmmakers in Silver Lake or ambitious academics in Princeton. That book wouldn’t have sold as well as its predecessor, the New Yorker might have relegated it to the Honorable Mentions section of its annual best book list, but it would have been safe and would have sold well enough to earn a big advance on her next book and maybe somebody would have gotten a movie made out of it this time. It’s clear that, after the runaway success of The Loves of Nathaniel P., she wanted to write characters that were not like her, characters whose lives were not like hers. In ways both comfortable and not, she’s succeeded.
April 22, 2024
Mind numbingly boring with no character development 😕
November 16, 2025
A team of hourly-wage workers at a big box retail store in small-town upstate New York slog away in the hours between 4 am and opening, stocking shelves etc, barely scraping by. When a rare opportunity for promotion opens up, the gears start to turn, and the gang concocts a plan to ensure things unfold as they wish. You know things are going to go awry, don’t you? A pretty faithful representation of wage slavery under less than ideal conditions.
June 18, 2024
Having just spent, as recently as this morning, another 45 minutes dealing with customer service at Amazon about items that I returned for which I received dunning notices to return or else I'll be charged, my guilt over using Amazon, which has never abated, intensified having read Help Wanted (although call center employees are probably no better off than those workers here). Amazon is the online retailer never to be mentioned by the employees and managers of Town Square, a physical big box retailer, whose store in the Catskills is hanging on, one of the last in the mall, in the small town still devastated by the decade-old closure of IBM. The focus is on those who work in "Movement" the logistics department manned by the poor souls coming in at 4 am to unload trucks bearing up to 2000 packages every single day, later breaking them out. Where once Town Hall cared about its employees - now the corporation too must hang on which has translated into insuring the Movement employees are denied the status of full-time with its attendant benefits, can lose meager health insurance instantly, can lose the chance of a minimal raise if they are once written up by HR, all have second or more jobs to make ends meet, and often they can't make those ends meet. The cycle is vicious and ongoing. An indictment, of course, of late stage capitalism, of the idea that bigger is better, of technology that has wrecked untold jobs and thus lives and futures. It's also a smaller story, how the Movement team functions, what spurs each of them, their personal histories, their squabbles and then how they come together to try to make their lives at Town Hall better, the desire in every human to actually do a good job, and, if possible, to find something to hope for. It's a slice of life, of lives going on all over the US, where the opportunities are nil or less than nil. I was engaged and immersed, and one day there will be nothing left, no mom and pop shops of which so few remain, no main streets with stores selling only local goods, it will be only Amazon, for everything, and who knows what will happen to those Movement employees, the likes of which exist all over this country, and for those of us lucky enough not to have to do such work, to deal with multiple jobs every day, we will spend all our lives calling Amazon customer service to find out why the item we returned still shows "in transit."
April 22, 2024
How refreshing to have an entire cast of characters who are working class and oh so real. This is US retail so they’re in fact the working poor. Retail workers unite. The jokes about unionising were my favourite. This book heightens the comraderie that comes with retail work as the warehouse workers unite to get their terrible boss promoted so she’s out of their hair. It also shows exactly what the online giant has done to bricks and mortar stores. It’s no The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. and the tension build and payoff leaves the reader a little dissatisfied but it’s the kind of book that once you start it’s hard to justify getting up to do anything else.
August 17, 2024
This is a raw view of America's corporate world from the eyes of labor workers and middle management, who all have to interact daily while also managing the work dynamics and their personal situations. Add to that equation the setting of a small town, people with talent but limited opportunities, and a lot of unaddressed health issues, and boom, you get a raw book that feels almost as if you were living the experiences with them.
December 25, 2023
A wise and kind-hearted study of human folly and the interplay of power and emotions in a retail workplace—and also a quietly searing indictment of late stage capitalism. I loved the characters and the writing was so well observed and precise. Another brilliant book by Adelle Waldman!
August 3, 2024
A quirky and illuminating novel of what life working in a big-box store is like, Help Wanted elicits all the emotions as we are walked through not only the trials and tribulations of each character within their personal lives, but also the complexities of the inner workings of a super store and the managerial hierarchy. Did I have flashbacks to my retail days? Oh yes. While this book may have been a bit too character driven even for me, I really appreciated this deep dive into small town, retail life.
Read if you like:
• character driven books
• small town life
• retail store setting
• quirky characters
• The Office
Thank you W. W. Norton & Company and Spotify Audiobooks for the gifted copies.
Read if you like:
• character driven books
• small town life
• retail store setting
• quirky characters
• The Office
Thank you W. W. Norton & Company and Spotify Audiobooks for the gifted copies.
March 19, 2024
This was a sad look at an underperforming branch of a lower-tier retail chain and the work-life balance challenges faced by the members of the store’s logistics/receiving team (the people that move and organize the merchandise from the trucks to the sales floor). Each of them is struggling in their own way and each gets a glimmer of hope when a rare promotional opportunity opens up.
I appreciated how something that might seem low-stakes to many people was presented as a chance to potentially change someone’s life for the better. Unfortunately, the characters seemed fairly generic as I was reading, with one in particular veering a bit too close to racial caricature at times. I just couldn’t get invested in the story or really cheer for anyone. The writing itself was straightforward; there’s welcome perspective on the ripple effect of online retailers on department store employees, but it felt like it could have gone a bit deeper. The ending was fairly predictable and left me shrugging my shoulders.
Again, I really like the idea. I wish I could have gotten more out of it.
I appreciated how something that might seem low-stakes to many people was presented as a chance to potentially change someone’s life for the better. Unfortunately, the characters seemed fairly generic as I was reading, with one in particular veering a bit too close to racial caricature at times. I just couldn’t get invested in the story or really cheer for anyone. The writing itself was straightforward; there’s welcome perspective on the ripple effect of online retailers on department store employees, but it felt like it could have gone a bit deeper. The ending was fairly predictable and left me shrugging my shoulders.
Again, I really like the idea. I wish I could have gotten more out of it.
March 20, 2024
Was like reading a very long, very boring script for the tv show Superstore.
April 12, 2024
This was okay. I liked the characters and the descriptions of working in retail (I felt like I was back at Michael's), but it was just okay. I didn't hate it, I didn't love it. I just...
May 28, 2025
Help Wanted follows a group of seasonal, hourly, warehouse workers at Town Square, a Target-like box store in upstate New York. When Town Square’s Store Manager, Big Will, announces that he'll be relocated to another store, the group realizes that they have a chance to get their belittling and incompetent Executive Manager, Meredith, off their backs if they can get her promoted into Big Will's spot. What's more, with Meredith potentially the new Store Manager, and Little Will, their Group Manager, stepping into Meredith's old spot, the Group Manager position, which is full-time and salaried, is theoretically open for any of them to take. Scheming ensues.
This is a book about the precariousness and hardship of low-wage retail work, but it's also about the specific power dynamics and sometimes solidarity that forms between the people who do this work. Each of Waldman’s characters feel like someone you’ve interacted with before, regardless of whether you’ve worked retail or not. Take this conversation between Milo, who unloads the distribution trucks each morning at 4am, and Travis, a recent hire:
Regardless of how often the people closest to him failed to see things in what Milo considered the correct light, he instinctively expected new people to take his side---at least if they had all the facts.
"Little Will and I started here together," he began. "We were seasonal hires. He and I were the only two of that year's batch to be hired on as permanent employees after the holidays." He paused, then added, "Out of more than twenty people."
Milo stopped talking. It took Travis a second to realize that he was expected to react to this statement. Dutifully, Travis raised his eyebrows, made himself look impressed. As if Travis had put another quarter in the slot (as an ex-con Travis had a lot of experience with pay phones), Milo continued.
"This was back when getting hired as a permanent employee was a big deal," he said. "It was during the recession. It wasn't like now, where any jackass can get hired."
Travis smiled, assuming that since he was a recent hire, Milo had meant to make a good-natured crack at his expense. But it hadn't occurred to Milo that his words might reflect on Travis. Milo's own reality was generally too vivid and overpowering for him to imagine other people's.
What I love most about this book is that no matter how annoying and socially oblivious a character like Milo may be, Waldman treats him with an empathy borne from understanding his intractable position in an economic system much larger than him. Here he is, a few pages later, sitting in a meeting with corporate higher-ups stating his case for why he thinks Meredith should or should not get a promotion:
This should have been gratifying—even jerky Ryan was taking his side—but Milo’s initial high at having gotten a rise out of them was beginning to dissipate. Besides, to him the pills were far less important than his other, more substantive emotional grievances. But life was often like this—people reacted with horror to minor technical violations of the rules while not saying anything about the things that really mattered, the things that hurt. It was like when you go to the store and the cashier acts so concerned about whether you want a bag and a receipt with your purchase, like it’s the most important thing in the world to them—but if they really cared so much about your happiness, wouldn’t they also care that you had really wanted to buy deli meat but couldn’t afford it so had to get peanut butter instead? Milo had recorded a monologue about this on his YouTube channel.”
This book made me into a bit of an evangelist, not just because I’m passionate about class politics and the complexities of workplace dynamics, but because the writing—the characterizations, the dialogue, the plotting—is so, so good.
This is a book about the precariousness and hardship of low-wage retail work, but it's also about the specific power dynamics and sometimes solidarity that forms between the people who do this work. Each of Waldman’s characters feel like someone you’ve interacted with before, regardless of whether you’ve worked retail or not. Take this conversation between Milo, who unloads the distribution trucks each morning at 4am, and Travis, a recent hire:
Regardless of how often the people closest to him failed to see things in what Milo considered the correct light, he instinctively expected new people to take his side---at least if they had all the facts.
"Little Will and I started here together," he began. "We were seasonal hires. He and I were the only two of that year's batch to be hired on as permanent employees after the holidays." He paused, then added, "Out of more than twenty people."
Milo stopped talking. It took Travis a second to realize that he was expected to react to this statement. Dutifully, Travis raised his eyebrows, made himself look impressed. As if Travis had put another quarter in the slot (as an ex-con Travis had a lot of experience with pay phones), Milo continued.
"This was back when getting hired as a permanent employee was a big deal," he said. "It was during the recession. It wasn't like now, where any jackass can get hired."
Travis smiled, assuming that since he was a recent hire, Milo had meant to make a good-natured crack at his expense. But it hadn't occurred to Milo that his words might reflect on Travis. Milo's own reality was generally too vivid and overpowering for him to imagine other people's.
What I love most about this book is that no matter how annoying and socially oblivious a character like Milo may be, Waldman treats him with an empathy borne from understanding his intractable position in an economic system much larger than him. Here he is, a few pages later, sitting in a meeting with corporate higher-ups stating his case for why he thinks Meredith should or should not get a promotion:
This should have been gratifying—even jerky Ryan was taking his side—but Milo’s initial high at having gotten a rise out of them was beginning to dissipate. Besides, to him the pills were far less important than his other, more substantive emotional grievances. But life was often like this—people reacted with horror to minor technical violations of the rules while not saying anything about the things that really mattered, the things that hurt. It was like when you go to the store and the cashier acts so concerned about whether you want a bag and a receipt with your purchase, like it’s the most important thing in the world to them—but if they really cared so much about your happiness, wouldn’t they also care that you had really wanted to buy deli meat but couldn’t afford it so had to get peanut butter instead? Milo had recorded a monologue about this on his YouTube channel.”
This book made me into a bit of an evangelist, not just because I’m passionate about class politics and the complexities of workplace dynamics, but because the writing—the characterizations, the dialogue, the plotting—is so, so good.
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