Help Wanted
By Adelle Waldman
Contemporary Fiction
W.W. Norton
March 2024
Dead-end jobs in big box stores, people trudging through their just-under-40-hours each week without benefits or enough of a paycheck to buy a house or a new car, or any car at all, sounds like a dreary but true story.
There is a lot of truth in Adelle Waldman's Help Wanted about the overnight inventory crew in one such store, but it's the opposite of a dreary book. The individual characters are fascinating, with stories to make a reader want them all to have a better shot. Even the ones who appear to be losers are stronger, more resilient and more deserving than the sad sack who shoplifted fish in the beginning of a Jonathan Franzen novel, and he was far above them in class structure.
Most of the crew has been together for some time. One of the department's strengths is low turnover. Their boss hasn't been with them long, though. Meredith is a would-be corporate ladder climber who took the position as a way to become store manager. She has not fit in well. She's bossy and doesn't understand how things work to get the job done.
But when it looks like they might be able to get rid of her if she becomes store manager when that position opens up, well, the scheming is as grand as anything in any other darkly comic novel, film or television program.
First, they have to get on the same page. Everyone dislikes Meredith, so how can they lie about how great she has been to get rid of her? Some in the group have to be convinced that this is how they can get rid of her. Because a store manager won't be all up in their business the way a department manager is.
And if they succeed in this, who among them is going to replace her? The current store manager, a nice enough guy who is being promoted, can't get a definitive answer from any of them. That no one seems a clear-cut leader makes the choice even more difficult. There are at least three with potential, but there are strikes against them. One fell into bad luck and then did time. Not everyone has a GED, let alone further education. Most of them don't believe in themselves and the ones who do aren't taking a realistic look at themselves.
As the campaign to get Meredith off their backs heads toward corporate executives coming to interview them, the ups and downs of each character's journey take both expected and surprising turns. Some look like they've cooked their own goose, but then the craziness of corporate think has its way.
Help Wanted is a welcome way to not only marvel at how different corporate think is from the real world most of us occupy. It also is a way to look at the lives of people who struggle to make basic ends meet, from commuting to their poorly paying job that demands so much, to being there for family and what happens if they need health care. The reader is invited into their world and given the chance to see how easy it would be for them to give up, and how many of them do not. They carry on. They've got a lot of heart, and so does the author in this tale of their lives.
i feel like retail is a sector of life not well represented in fiction. books about bookstores tend to romanticize it, and i seldom see books about, like walmart or something. this sounds like a welcome antidote to that.