Help Wanted
Adelle Waldman
W. W. Norton & Company, 2024, $28.99
Working the pre-dawn shift in a big-box store probably won’t top the list of dream jobs for most people. In her new novel, Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman’s detailed descriptions of each worker’s tasks drive home the exhausting repetition and diligence that are the beating heart of the store, in this case, the fictitious Town Square (read Target) in the fictitious upstate New York town of Pottertown (read Kingston). But she fleshes out each character with enough humanity to make them relatable, and they bond together and sympathize with one another to form an ad hoc tribe.
The focus is on Team Movement, a group that “throws the truck” each morning pre-dawn—unloading, sorting, and arranging displays of various departments’ goods. Creativity manifests in subversive ways. Milo, the thrower who moves boxes from the truck onto the line, takes pride in creating “shows,” or thematic sequences of goods that tell a story. Val arranges T-shirts with mottos so that shirts she finds offensive (along MAGA lines) hang behind ones she likes. A variety of factors affect a worker’s potential for promotion, from a troubled partner, to no car, to the lack of a college degree. The fragile economic situations of the workers mean that every late clock-in is perilous.
Like cliques in any company, the Movement team gossips. They pick apart the executive manager, Meredith, a chipper go-getter who has not worked her way up the ladder, and thus doesn’t know the complexities behind each job. The big story line emerges—will Meredith be promoted to store manager after its current one, Big Will, transfers to Connecticut? Or will it be Anita, who has been there longer but is far less overtly ambitious? Movement mobilizes to cruelly sabotage Anita’s chances so they can be rid of the annoying Meredith, who’d ostensibly get the promotion and be out of their hair on a daily basis.
Target may be the model for Town Square, where posher folks shop for bargains, but whose employees frequent the cheaper Walmart. Waldman’s commitment to workaday details might seem antithetical to building a compelling novel, but its depiction of the plight of the worker resonates. The fact that Waldman herself worked at the Target at the Hudson Valley Mall for six months provided real info that made for a solid foundation on which to build the Machiavellian plot.
Waldman’s previous novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., made a popular and critical splash a decade ago, after Waldman was passed over by eight agents. The author, living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, struggled to craft a worthy sophomore effort. A move to Rhinebeck, a baby, and Trump’s election conspired to push her to act on a note in her possible ideas list: work a minimum-wage job. Her commitment to literally “doing the work” has given her street cred that exceeds a college diploma. With this immersion in a completely unfamiliar economic and work world to mold into fiction fodder, Waldman may not have anticipated becoming a megaphone for hourly workers, and yet the New York Times has published two of her editorials on the topic in recent months.
As she points out, part-time workers’ hourly wages have risen in recent years; this hourly is then multiplied by a salaried jobs’ hours, resulting in a falsely-computed, misleading annual take. In reality, part-timers are at the mercy of managers, seasonal demand, and logistical planning (or lack thereof). It’s not unusual for a worker to be limited to 39 hours in a week, one hour short of eligibility for benefits.
Everyone loves a bargain. But after reading Help Wanted, I may never be able to walk through a big-box store without thinking about the workers who make it possible, but pay the price in so many ways.
This article appears in May 2024.
