It's Not Just a Job

Adelle Waldman's Help Wanted

Note: My review of Ali Smith’s Gliff for RealClearBooks from late last month is linked here.

Help Wanted. By Adelle Waldman. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2025. 304 pp. $17.99.

The setting of Adelle Waldman’s novel Help Wanted, a warehouse at a big box store in upstate New York, might put one in mind of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full (1998), in which his character Conrad Hensley begins his part of the story with a shift at the “Suicidal Freezer Unit”, a food warehouse near Oakland. In how many novels has one read a sustained description of manual labor, let alone of shifting boxes and cartons among roving forklifts, in the intervening years? Fiction writers mostly write about people who think, talk, and make decisions for a living, including other writers, and Waldman has done this in a most concentrated and deliberately insular way in her first novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013), in which the young writer Nate thinks first of himself and his work, then of his relationships with other writers. But Waldman like Wolfe was a newspaper reporter before publishing fiction, and has set out to write on life outside the chattering classes. Hensley is a blue-collar figure in Wolfe’s panorama which includes real estate developers, bankers, a lawyer, the mayor of Atlanta, a college football player facing legal trouble, inmates, and Vietnamese migrants. A Man in Full is Dickensian in its diffuseness, though the parts will of course be made to interlock. Waldman’s two novels take their epigraphs from George Eliot, who with the exception of the arguably incoherent Daniel Deronda, worked on a smaller scale than Dickens’ London or Wolfe’s New York or Atlanta: think of Middlemarch, of course, or the Raveloe of Silas Marner, another fictional rural village in the Midlands. With Help Wanted, Waldman has in some sense expanded to encompass several main characters, while greatly contracting the setting, from the oddly featureless New York of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. to the carefully rendered Town Square Store #1512, upstate in fictional Potterstown.

At 3:55 a.m., the nine members of Team Movement clock in at the warehouse. Movement, which used to be called Logistics but was changed to sound “more fun and modern”, is responsible for getting stuff out of the trucks and into the store. Theirs is only a four-hour shift, ending when the store opens at 8 a.m., at which time these “roaches”, as other teams call them, are to “scatter” and leave the customers to chirpy salespeople. The hours might feel long but are actually insufficient, limited by the company so that it doesn’t have to grant benefits like sick days and healthcare, and the Movement workers make between ten and twenty-five thousand a year. In summer, as the novel begins, there is a big backlog of product stuck in the warehouse, and thus there are empty shelves in the store. The Executive Manager of Movement, a recent transfer named Meredith, keeps a tight grip on the budget. Her boss, whom everyone calls Big Will, announces to the team that as he has been transferred to another Town Square in Connecticut, someone will be getting promoted to his position, Store Manager. Meredith is understood to be the most likely choice. This would move Little Will, the popular group manager of Movement, into her role, leaving his post open for one of the nine. Even those without vaulting ambition want Meredith promoted, so that this very difficult woman will no longer be supervising them.

Meredith is Waldman’s most vivid and least sympathetic creation. She arrives with a banging of the warehouse doors and a “Hellooo!!!” at the end of Chapter 1, in company standard khaki jeans and blue t-shirt, but compensating with suede ankle boots, pink-glossed lips, and pencil-lined eyes, her chin-length blonde hair recently blow dried. This should all sound familiar: she is a “Karen”. Nicole, the youngest in the team, an affianced twenty-three-year-old who sometimes falls back on food stamps and wonders about college, is the one most appalled by Meredith’s pettiness, her condescension, and her opportunity at a hundred and ten thousand dollar salary. The ambitious Val will lead Movement’s effort to get Meredith promoted—by lying when interviewed about her merits and sabotaging her rival from a different department—and charismatic Diego will have to talk Nicole into joining them. Waldman moves freely, often quite rapidly, between close third person perspectives, from Wills Big and Little, Meredith, Nicole, Diego, and the rest of the team: temperamental Milo, who unloads the truck; Callie, the new hire and new mother; Ruby, a former fast food manager and mother figure to Nicole; Raymond, whose unhappy girlfriend has been spending their utility budget on pills; Travis, rehabilitated after a few convictions but without the GED he needs for promotion; and Joyce, who after fifteen years resents all the ways Town Square has changed.

Those changes include the shift to part time employment, and the end of overtime, but Help Wanted is not so much about working conditions as about work culture. The nine have a sort of solidarity to begin with, based on shared gripes, and they become a different kind of team in joining to push Meredith’s promotion, but the sly joke of the novel, the thing very nearly left unsaid, is that they would never seriously consider forming a union. The appeal of promotion encourages selfish striving, management uses compliments in lieu of raises, and the company has a policy of hosting pizza parties at stores where union organizers are active. Town Square is not Walmart, Waldman explains: it is known for knockoffs of boutique items for customers with a household income around a hundred thousand dollars, and it coasts on what remains of a reputation for treating its workers a little better than other big retailers. Nonetheless, labor supply is short in Potterstown (from which IBM departed long ago), so “employee morale” must be managed as carefully as inventory. Town Square must try for a pleasing image of virtue, a beaming face. Val, a woman who was once homeless, now with a wife and son, reckons her odds of getting group manager pretty good, partly because the company would like to mention an inspiring, DEI-approved story of internal promotion in its annual report. Big Will is shown on one of those reports fastening a cardboard menorah to the store’s Hannukah display, “looking cheerful but respectful.” Meredith knows what tone she should go for, saying “thanks, guys” a lot and offering gloomy Nicole a high-five, but in her temper she has sometimes broken character. Waldman has found the right subject here, and her satirical treatment of that subject is skillfully balanced with the needs of the story, so that when the executives above Will arrive near the end for the interviews, it is also a good moment for their higher perspective on all the frantic activity in the store.

Some qualifications to give against the scheme that associated Waldman with Eliot, Wolfe with Dickens. Waldman, like Wolfe, enjoys a jaunty, magazine-friendly simile, such as a wrinkle between a concentrating man’s eyebrows “like an OCCUPIED sign on a restroom door”. This same character, a district manager named Ryan, has a head tapering to a “narrow and cone-like” crown, and a “funhouse-like alternation between narrow and wide” through the rest of his body. Readers of the The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. will remember such descriptions, intended as Dickensian distortions, but convoluted and difficult to really picture because Waldman lacks the caricaturist’s talent for identifying distinctive features before exaggerating them. Wolfe struggles in his own way, manfully, for such effects, while Eliot is too cerebral for this sort of thing. One senses in both Wolfe and Waldman an affection for every character, major or minor, which Dickens has less consistently, and Eliot lacks.

But a lot of Eliot’s rigorous realism has survived. Waldman shares with her an interest in professional ambition, the finding of the talent and the métier, and has now taken this to a workplace where such ambition is necessary even just to upgrade to a two-bedroom apartment. That same intense attention that Eliot had is set on a smaller area, a well-lit stage divided between warehouse and store. Waldman’s characters’ ways are not so attributable to fixed traits as those of Eliot’s, depending more on whim and circumstance. We feel for Gwendolen Harleth, Silas Marner, Rosamond and Lydgate, because they are victims of their own natures; if we feel for Waldman’s characters, we are responding to a different plight. Waldman is deliberate, even scrupulous, in showing why Milo, whom Nicole and many readers will find almost as cringemaking as Meredith, acts as he does, and how Big Will, with his ostensibly easier life, has been affected by the financial crisis, and now finds himself in a dilemma over the succession plan. There is no dramatic revelation of backstory used to change our minds about anything; with some choice staging and free indirect disclosures, Waldman helps us see things another way. The immediate stakes are never raised higher than whether or not Meredith will get that promotion, but we are reoriented in the novel’s setting so that this becomes terribly important. When we are caught up in the novel’s “particular web”, what matters is whatever matters to the characters. For readers of Help Wanted, the “feeling of all ordinary human life”, that “roar which lies on the other side of silence”, is actually something more than just a dream packaged in a lovely quotation.