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Summary
Summary
Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day's truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn't schedule them for enough hours--most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs. When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement--including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her "cool kid" status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path--band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.
Adelle Waldman's debut novel was a breakout sensation, lauded by the Los Angeles Times as an "exacting character study" with "excellent and witty prose" and described as "incisive and very funny" by the Economist and "brilliant" by both NPR's Fresh Air and the Washington Post. In her long-awaited follow-up, Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and astute social observation to the world of modern, low-wage work. A humane and darkly comic workplace caper that shines a light on the odds low-wage workers are up against in today's economy, Help Wanted is a funny, moving tale of ordinary people trying to make a living.
Author Notes
Adelle Waldman is the best-selling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Economist, NPR, Elle, and many others. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She lives in New York State.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Waldman's perceptive sophomore novel (after The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.) centers on the employees of a big-box store in Upstate New York. Nine of them are a part of the Movement team, arriving at four a.m. to unload trucks, unpack boxes, and stock the shelves before the store opens. Team manager Meredith, who's under pressure from corporate headquarters to maintain the department's budget, alienates the others by refusing requests for additional work hours or raises, contributing to their struggles to make ends meet. When the store manager announces he's transferring to another location, and that corporate will be coming to interview employees to decide which team manager will take his role, Movement member Val sees an opportunity to get rid of Meredith by pushing to promote her. Val and the other team members put the plan in action, and several of them begin fantasizing about a promotion. Though Waldman touches only briefly on the employees' personal lives, making it difficult to keep all the characters straight, the narrative builds to a satisfying and surprising conclusion. It's a bracing and worthwhile glimpse of the high stakes faced by low-wage workers. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
The post-1945 American novel was usually in some deep way about anxiety: the anxiety of living in America, with its enormous postwar wealth and its correspondingly enormous social pressures and opportunities. The great hope of its characters, like the great hope of America generally, used to lie in social mobility: up, up, and away! But in the 21st century, to hear young writers tell it, the social pressures have won. Anxiety, in the contemporary American novel, has given way to defeatism and pointillist satire: finely honed accounts of a calcified class system, or of its guilt-stricken bourgeois-bohemian alternatives (see the current crop of Berlin expat novels). We know what has happened. The increasing concentration of resources in the hands of a tiny cluster of gargantuan corporations; the transfer of manufacturing operations from the American heartland to China and the Global South, where labour is cheap; the rise of online retail, with its seductive conveniences and its indifference to the environment ¿ the postwar social tapestry has been unravelled. Luxury at the top, fear in the middle, serfdom at the bottom, and nobody going anywhere: this is the reality with which the novelist of contemporary American life must wrestle. When you're trapped in a rigged system, all you can do is try to manipulate it to your advantage Of course, Edith Wharton and Henry James did OK writing finely honed accounts of a calcified class system. Rigid hierarchies tend to provoke novels of manners - novels that thrive on rules, novels that are, in a sense, about rules. Adelle Waldman's second novel is such a book. Help Wanted surely qualifies as "long-awaited", since Waldman's brilliant debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, came out in 2013. Nathaniel P was also, in its way, a novel of manners; specifically, it was a vivisection of the male ego, performed via a portrait of the titular Nathaniel, a young novelist who makes everything, including the feelings of the women he sleeps with, all about him. Help Wanted is an equally acidic comedy about contemporary American serfs. It's a kind of communal novel about the people clinging to the bottom of the social cliff: the two-jobbers, the drop-outs, the working poor. There is no protagonist as such; the novel head-hops in a way that Henry James would disapprove of but that enacts a politics of shared experience, very much to the novel's point. The main characters all work for Town Square, a big-box mega-retailer not unlike Walmart. (Waldman worked at one such store for a period while she was writing the novel.) The book focuses on Team Movement, which is Town Square's "fun and modern" name for logistics: the people who unpack delivery trucks before dawn and "break out" the boxes to line the shelves. The name is also ironic: moving is what these employees can't do. Cancelled food stamps, crippling student loan repayments, absurd medical bills (a case of strep throat costs Raymond, a Movement worker, over a thousand dollars): step by step, Help Wanted outlines the ways in which contemporary American life constitutes, designedly, a trap for the economically disadvantaged. The members of Movement live and work in Potterstown, NY - the name evoking Pottersville, the banker-ravaged dystopia from It's a Wonderful Life. Potterstown has been gutted by the closure of its IBM factory. Many of the Movement employees work two jobs to stay afloat: Little Will, the group manager, does landscaping on the side; Ruby, a black woman whose son is in prison, does shifts at a co-op supermarket. Town Square's careful meanness - shrinking hours off-season, using technicalities to withhold bonuses and promotions - makes double-jobbing a necessity. When you're trapped in a rigged system, all you can do is try to manipulate it to your advantage. Hence, the Movement workers conspire within the rules to get their hated boss, the irritating Meredith, promoted, so that one of them can take her job. A superb, empathic comedy of manners ensues. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Help Wanted is that Waldman manages, in telling her small story, to describe not just the American economic prison but the global one. So: both a novel of manners and a systems novel, a book that shows us, perhaps, how intimately linked these apparently disparate genres were all along. It's a funny novel, as well as deeply humane and very angry. The title refers to bogus ads stuck up around Town Square (the company won't hire new staff: too costly). But it also reads, with a frightening lack of irony, as a message from America itself. Help wanted. The question is, who's listening?
Kirkus Review
At a big-box retailer in upstate New York, a team of workers is energized by a secret plan. "'Roaches' was what other employees called the people who worked Movement, because they descended on the store in the dark of night, then scattered in the morning, when the customers arrived." Waldman's long-awaited follow-up to The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) is set in a totally different world--bye-bye, literary Brooklyn; hello, blue-collar Potterstown, a forlorn small town with a view of the Catskills, stuck in a downward spiral ever since the local IBM plant closed. What remains the same is the author's emotional intelligence, wry humor, and sensitivity to matters of money and class. Meanwhile, the details of daily operation and workplace culture at Town Square Store #1512 are evoked in fine and fascinating detail. The members of Team Movement (formerly "Logistics") are introduced in the org chart that opens the book, and that org chart is the heart of the plot. Currently the nine "roaches" are managed by a guy they call Little Will. Everybody loves Little Will, but his self-absorbed boss, Meredith, a Fashion Institute of Technology dropout, is a nightmare. Now the top dog, Big Will, whose "nonthreatening air of diversity, combined with his good looks and his youth," make him a corporate dreamboat, is getting his hoped-for transfer to his home state of Connecticut. Does that mean the hated Meredith will get his job? But if so, would Little Will move up and leave a management slot free for one of the roaches, who get no benefits whatsoever? This situation inspires a smart lesbian mom named Val to cook up a plot in which each of her sympathetically imagined Movement compadres plays a role. Even the coffeepot in the break room during a team meeting is a character: "hissing and sputtering wildly, like a small animal trying to scare off a larger predator." The workplace dramedy of the year. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
There's a cutthroat game of employment roulette underway at the Town Square superstore in an economically distressed city in Upstate New York. The store's beloved general manager is leaving, and the opening is as substantial as the key block in a teetering Jenga tower. For the store's lowliest employees, those who work the grueling middle-of-the-night shift in the warehouse and loading dock, the choice of candidate is personal. Their direct supervisor, Meredith, a chirpy, insensitive go-getter, is one of two contenders. She's a corporate toady universally disliked among her staff. Still, if Meredith moves up, maybe one of them will get her spot. Waldman's (The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, 2013) crew of hardworking merchandise movers concocts a plan to ensure that Meredith is promoted, and their three-dimensional chess scheme is a master class in team building. With great compassion and humility, Waldman illustrates each employee's litany of unfortunate choices and unforced errors that has brought them to the brink of desperation, where each minute clocked and each benefit denied has life-changing impact. Waldman shines a much-needed spotlight on the inequities of corporate retail policies and practices by humanizing the plight of the workers whom consumers rely upon but rarely acknowledge.
