Help Wanted: A Novel

by Adelle Waldman

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A VOGUE and Vulture Best Book of the Year So Far • One of New York Magazine's "23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024" • One of ELLE’s Best (and Most Anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024 • A Lit Hub and Kirkus Most Anticipated Book of 2024 • One of Lilith Magazine’s “21 Books We Want to Read in 2024”

From the best-selling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. comes a funny, eye-opening tale of work in contemporary America.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324020448
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	28,653
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

01/08/2024

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.)

Publishers Weekly

"The dramatic irony instills this comic novel’s small-time escapades with a potent and lingering feeling of injustice."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"Great workplace novels are few and far between…and great workplace novels that deal with social and economic class in our country are even rarer. However, Waldman adds a rare entry to the workplace canon with this wise, funny story of an upstate New York big-box store."

Los Angeles Times - Bethanne Patrick

"Funny and brilliant.…Airing the real world of low-wage work, Waldman shows how its dysfunction and instability skews the livelihoods of her deftly captured characters—and millions of other all-but-invisible workers like them."

National Book Review - James Graff

"Help Wanted washes labor in a stately, almost Steinbeckian light, emphasizing its difficulty but also its dignity….[I]t launches a broader social critique under the guise of a fizzy caper."

The New Yorker - Katy Waldman

"Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious.…I doubt there are many authors who could write a literary critique of neoliberalism as breezy and almost sitcom-like as Help Wanted."

New York Times - Michelle Goldberg

"I can’t think of a book more necessary. Adelle Waldman takes us into the universe of American labor with generosity and compassion. It has been a while since workers have been portrayed through the lens of a novelist with such insight and attention to the details of service industry life. Simply enthralling."

Gary Shteyngart

"Waldman observes her characters with the hilarious, remorseless precision real people use on real people.…Waldman’s briskly roving point of view captures the constant squeeze on everyone."

Air Mail - Tom Socca

"Graced with the psychological acuity that distinguished its predecessor."

NPR - Maureen Corrigan

"A superb, empathic comedy of manners….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."

Guardian - Kevin Power

"A serious moral inquiry into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store, Help Wanted is a novel about work, about the retail industry in the age of Amazon, and about the effects of late capitalism on human relations. It is also hard to put down."

Keith Gessen

"What a gorgeous and ingenious and heartfelt work Help Wanted is!"

Michelle Orange

"With great compassion and humility….Waldman shines a much-needed spotlight on the inequities of corporate retail policies and practices."

Booklist (starred review) - Carol Haggas

"Help Wanted isn’t just smart and funny and wise. It’s also important—vital, really—to our understanding of how and why the American dream is becoming increasingly inaccessible to working class Americans, even as that long-shot dream stubbornly refuses to die."

Richard Russo

"Whereas Waldman went narrow in the cultural purview of her first book, she has gone wide now…If Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was a comedy of manners, Help Wanted is a tragedy of circumstance…As ever, Waldman is a sharp observer of the world, a writer whose attention to particulars only sharpens the big picture."

The Atlantic - Jordan Kisner

"Reflective, wry…If The Office had been centered on the warehouse crew at Dunder Mifflin, but without playing its workers entirely for laughs, it might have looked something like Waldman’s book."

Book Reporter - Harvey Freedenberg

"Help Wanted is a marvelous novel. We get to eavesdrop and follow and enjoy the misadventures of the motley cast working the four in the morning shift (unloading trucks at a big box store, a place none of these workers can afford). On one level this is about economics and gentrification; on another level it is about people struggling to keep themselves from drowning; meanwhile there are hijinks so funny you blow your tea out of your nose; there’s a perfectly absurd plot straight out of Catch-22. We want everyone to get that lifesaving promotion. The worst thing about this novel is that I finished it and can’t ever read it again for the first time. But now it is part of my life. I am thankful to Adelle Waldman for being brave and talented and bighearted enough to have created this gift."

Charles Bock

"An immersive, deeply affecting human drama."

Bookseller

"Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and a profoundly human exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labor market. The characters are so richly drawn—so full, under all their defenses, of the desire to be loved—that even the annoying ones will win your heart. Adelle Waldman is a master."

Elif Batuman

"Sociologically astute, deeply humane, and cleverly plotted.…In the venerable tradition of social novels such as Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Charles Dickens' Hard Times, Help Wanted draws attention to moral issues raised by systemic exploitation of the working poor. The marvel is that Waldman manages to do so with an engaging, lightly satirical touch."

Christian Science Monitor - Heller McAlpin

"A shrewd workplace comedy that never makes low-wage workers or the issues they face the punchline."

Time - Shannon Carlin

"Like The Office in its universal workplace humor and even more like Mike White’s Enlightened in its textured portrayal of how small humiliations and injustices at work inevitably boil over into righteous rage, Help Wanted feels at once familiar yet revelatory in its specificity….[C]apture[s] a world and a moment in time in a way that…has more in common with the works of George Eliot and Jane Austen than most novels published today."

New York Magazine - Emily Gould

"Adelle Waldman applies her sharp sense for relational drama and dark comedy to the retail work space.…Help Wanted is structured around the collective, depicting the toll of capitalism on low-wage workers."

Alexandra Chang

"The events in Adelle Waldman's fleet-footed novel Help Wanted take place at a box store of declining fortunes in upstate New York—a setting that in Waldman's steady hands proves to be a crucible of ambition and survival."

Vogue - Taylor Antrim

"Life behind the scenes of big-box retail is plumbed with wit, wisdom, and humanity in this fresh workplace drama….Waldman’s depiction of the routines, backstories, and relationships among a group of wonderfully believable characters could not be more fascinating or more fun."

People Magazine

"In Help Wanted, the tragic heroes of the gig economy, full of dreams and sob stories and what-if scenarios, concoct a plot to better their lives. Yet even as frustrations mount and their plot goes sideways, hope never dies. Adelle Waldman delivers both a brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us, whose full humanity has never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered."

Joshua Ferris

★ 2023-12-06
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.

Kirkus Reviews