In ‘Help Wanted,’ a Satirist of Literary Brooklyn Takes On the Big-Box Store

Probably all of us have been inside a place like Town Square location #1512, the fictional big-box store that provides the setting for Adelle Waldman’s new novel, Help Wanted. It’s the kind with colorful seasonal displays and wide aisles, the kind that in the ’80s and ’90s came to signify the peak of American commerce: the convenience of being able to buy baby food, a lawn mower, and a plastic Christmas tree all in one brightly lit, airplane-hangar-size space.

It’s surprising, really, that such stores, emblematic of American capitalism as they are, don’t feature prominently in more novels. Waldman’s Town Square seems almost too obviously allegorical. At #1512, empty shelves pockmark the aisles, giving the store a dilapidated feel. “Corporate” (a vague presence) wants store managers to prioritize low budgets above all else, so the managers have concluded that empty shelves are preferable to spending money on workers to stock items. Business has faded, stolen by an unnamed online retail giant. This image of shrinkage evokes the mood of the novel, which takes place in fictional, hollowed-out Potterstown, in upstate New York, its infrastructure now outsize, dating to a time of more prosperity, more people, more life. The big companies that once had local factories have departed for cheaper workforces, and the residents who didn’t leave with them scramble to assemble enough employment to pay their bills.

A generation ago, Potterstown fostered a solid working class, but its current young adults have few prospects for stability. Half the people working on Town Square’s Movement team (formerly Logistics, and based in the store’s adjoining warehouse) live, as 23-year-old Nicole did until recently, with their mother or grandmother. Nicole’s mother likes to remind her that, in her 20s, she was already married and a homeowner, markers of security that held steady even when the local job market tanked. For Nicole, who has a baby and a fiancé, prospects feel more limited.

All employees at Town Square, except managers, have been reduced to part-time, so that the company doesn’t have to offer benefits or a guaranteed number of hours. During the holidays, Town Square hires temporary part-time workers to avoid giving their year-round staff enough hours to qualify for health care. One store veteran complains that 15 years ago, when their branch opened, “working full-time, forty hours a week, wasn’t some big privilege—something you had to beg for. It was standard. That meant you could work here and live on what you made. You wouldn’t be rich, but you could live. If you wanted to make more, you could work overtime. Not anymore.”

At this point in her speech, two men interject, ready to start their own rants about, respectively, undocumented immigrants and China. She cuts them off:

This is what it is like to work in Movement, a name with the empty ring of forward motion, organizing, progress, flow. Occasionally, the workers forge a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose—bursts of solidarity and friendship that give the book warmth—but one senses that these are furtive victories over Town Square’s culture.

Help Wanted is Waldman’s second book. Her debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., was rightly hailed as an incisive comedy of manners when it was published in 2013. Like Help Wanted, Nathaniel P. offered a detailed, anthropological investigation of an insular slice of society governed by its own procedures, lingo, and power struggles: the literary scene of New York around that time. Her subjects were Harvard-educated writers concerned predominantly with getting laid, getting published, and performing the correct kind of liberal politics at parties.

Its protagonist, Nate, is an ambitious and occasionally charming young writer who lives in an apartment he rarely cleans, prides himself on being a sensitive and ethical man, and systematically mistreats every single woman in his path. Like many novels of manners, Nathaniel P. seems at first blush to be a niche book about small things—its world is as narrow as a railroad apartment—but the fine-tuned way that Waldman captures the breathtaking sexism and intellectual hypocrisy of the New York literary world of that era pushes the book toward something more muscular and political.

Nate’s world is as far as can be from the warehouse workers’ grinding precarity in Help Wanted, but Waldman’s approach to both is driven by a common set of questions: What lies do people tell themselves to justify their own quest for power, security, and affirmation? Whose needs—or material realities—do they have to see as less than real? And where do they grasp or stumble into moments of connection?

Waldman’s strength is dramatic irony, and she is attracted to characters whose flaws are fluorescently obvious to the reader (and, often enough, the character’s friends and family) but remain invisible to the characters themselves. How painful it is to inhabit Nate’s point of view while he uses his “progressive” politics as a cover to treat the people around him badly, or deftly converts his own insecurity or guilty conscience into a rationale for punishing the woman he’s mistreating. Nate is such a pathetic, second-rate guy, but always, in his mind, the good guy, the victim, the noble protagonist.

This same agility with characters’ psychology is key to the polyvocal Help Wanted, which rotates among the roughly dozen characters who work in Movement at Town Square. The warehouse is full of personalities, and Waldman gives each its due. Val, a lesbian on the cusp of 30 with a wife and child, lived in her car after running away from home in her teens and is now aching to establish both her financial stability and her respectability as an upstanding middle-class American. Diego, a Black man who emigrated from Honduras as a teenager, now lives in a basement apartment with his girlfriend, who struggles with bipolar disorder. Without a car, he walks to work along a highway in the early-morning dark and hopes not to get hit. Milo is an emotionally labile man with a slight victim complex, amplified by his thwarted creative aspirations. He “throws” the truck every morning, which means that he unloads boxes onto the processing line, and he uses his role to create little art “shows.” One morning, he does the human life cycle: First he unloads boxes of baby food and a stroller, then a play kitchen and a kid’s bike; then a gaming console and cans of Red Bull for adolescence, laundry detergent and an alarm clock for adulthood, and denture cleaner and a walker for senescence. The American life, cradle to grave, in products—it’s maybe a higher-concept art piece than Milo intends.

From the January/February 2023 issue: ‘That’s just like White Noise.’

Joyce, the old-timer who remembers when all the employees got benefits, will retire soon. Raymond, who lives with his mother, desperately hopes to afford a party at Chuck E. Cheese for his son’s sixth birthday. Big Will, the store manager, who went to college, wears a mustache to make himself look older. And Meredith, the aggressively incompetent and hostile middle manager who oversees Movement and the warehouse, utterly lacks the people skills she’d need to ascend the corporate ladder, which she intensely desires to do.

If this sounds like a large cast to keep track of, it is. But under Waldman’s management, the book remains relatively nimble thanks to a straightforward plot setup: Big Will is getting promoted and transferred to another location. That means an internal candidate will be moved up to fill his job. Meredith seems favored for the promotion, but corporate is coming to interview the warehouse workers before making the decision. The warehouse workers can sink Meredith, whom they hate, or they can push for her promotion and get her, at least in the most immediate sense, out of their department. If Meredith becomes store manager, her well-liked No. 2 in Movement will move up to her former spot, leaving an available management position for one of them.

The workers, led by Val, are galvanized as a group when they decide to try to throw the job for Meredith, even though her competition, a Black woman named Anita who runs a different department, is far and away the better, kinder, more capable candidate. Many of the plotters privately dream of being chosen for the management job, with its guaranteed hours and benefits, though that dream is more realistic for some of them than others.

From the January 1905 issue: The country store

It is a credit to Waldman that although none of these characters is especially charismatic, you nevertheless find yourself wishing at one point or another that each of them could get the promotion. Each wonders, as Nicole does, what it would be like to have an income “large enough so that her bank balance didn’t fall precipitously close to zero between paychecks.” For her, it would mean getting her own car, and no longer worrying about whether she could feed her baby if something went wrong yet again with her food-stamp card. For Diego, it would mean being able to move out of the basement and into a home with more light and fresh air, and maybe being able to afford a car. For Val, it would mean finally achieving the security she never thought she’d have as a gay woman.

A plot that turns on a dozen people dreaming, scheming, and competing for a single shot at the basic dignity of earning a decent living is depressing. Waldman is faithful to reality: The relentless grind in which these characters find themselves won’t change. There’s little opportunity for any real transformation, hope, or happy ending. And yet this is the plot that guides the lives of millions of Americans. Whereas Waldman went narrow in the cultural purview of her first book, she has gone wide now.

Maybe that’s why the visceral psychological acuity of her debut feels slightly lacking in Help Wanted ’s dramatis personae. The novel is a portrait of an ecosystem rather than a profile of an individual type, and so she necessarily handles more characters with less depth. But her real subject, the human network within a big-box store, receives a minute and thoughtful rendering that reflects Waldman’s signature sensitivity to how people seek a sense of control and self-determination within the parameters they are given. Thorough research clearly went into the descriptions of the warehouse production line, the process of restocking items on shelves, the different protocols for creating attractive merchandise displays, the dispiriting corporate-speak used to manipulate employees into feeling good about situations that should, and do, make them feel bad. (For example, management demands a week of overnight shifts to mask the results of Meredith’s incompetence, framing the need as a generous offer of extra hours.) The power dynamics are carefully elaborated: the politics of who wears what kind of shoes; who’s got their GED and why; the reason the in-store staff call the warehouse workers “roaches” (they scatter when the sun comes up).

Consider the attention Waldman pays to the taxonomies of lingerie display:

This goes on. It’s numbing. One assumes that effect is intended: to impress upon the reader the banal endlessness of the labor required to make something like underwear shopping pleasing for the consumer, a banality that takes on a surreal, malevolent quality when set against the struggle for survival in the life of the worker.

If The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was a comedy of manners, Help Wanted is a tragedy of circumstance. Everyone is compromised in a situation like this, and almost no one is getting out of the trap. (Except the store manager, who was always going to be okay. He went to the University of Connecticut.) The novel takes on the tone of a morality tale: As Movement pursues the plan to give one of them a chance at a full-time job, they commit to sabotaging Anita, whom they respect. Each supplies their personal justification for this betrayal, which quickly hardens into a belief that they have no choice. Val, who champions the plan, has a brief pang of conscience, remembering an earlier moment when she came across Anita crying because she couldn’t afford to send her children to the gymnastics class they’d begged for. Suddenly, she sees “Anita as a person—this time as a single mother, trying to give her kids a decent childhood.” This flash of humanity doesn’t persuade Val to change course—her loyalties are to herself and to her Movement co-workers, allies in her plot. It just makes her feel like a bad person, a feeling she quickly rationalizes away.

Help Wanted is a less sexy book (lingerie taxonomy notwithstanding) than its predecessor, but the decade that has elapsed since that satirical coming-of-age debut justifies a shift in focus from the witty-but-wretched bourgeois intelligentsia to the drama of systems collapse. As ever, Waldman is a sharp observer of the world, a writer whose attention to particulars only sharpens the big picture.

This article appears in the March 2024 print edition with the headline “Shelf Life.”