Help Wanted

Adelle Waldman

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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.

Book Details

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: Feb 4th, 2025
Pages: 304
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.80in - 0.55lb
EAN: 9781324105176
Categories: • Literary• Satire• Humorous - Dark Humor

About the Author

Waldman, Adelle: - Adelle Waldman's first novel was The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., a bestseller that was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Economist, NPR, Elle, and many others. She lives in New York State.

Praise for this book

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, author of Either/Or

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.--James Graff "National Book Review"

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.--Jordan Kisner "Atlantic"

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.--Harvey Freedenberg "Bookreporter.com"

The workplace dramedy of the year.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

With great compassion and humility.... Waldman shines a much-needed spotlight on the inequities of corporate retail policies and practices.--Booklist, starred review

Tightly plotted, slyly caustic and often very funny, it's hugely enjoyable.--Daily Mail (UK)

Sharply observed...Waldman's writing is richest and most humane as she traces each worker's private ambitions.--Telegraph (UK)

A smart satire of skulduggery and drudgery.--Times (UK)

Corporate hypocrisy and the futility of hard graft are skewered in this novel on working culture in a New York superstore.... [S]hows Waldman's gift for subtle, devastating satire.--Max Liu, Financial Times (UK)

How did the writer of a novel that precisely described the parties and bedrooms of literary Brooklyn transform into the writer of Help Wanted, a deeply political yet highly readable story about the lives of low-wage workers? The answer might be that the novels have more in common than is readily apparent, despite their very different settings; both of them capture a world and a moment in time in a way that's become unstylish in recent history and has a closer affinity with the works of George Eliot and Jane Austen than most novels published today.--Emily Gould "New York Magazine"

Sociologically astute, deeply humane, and cleverly plotted.--Heller McAlpin "Christian Science Monitor"

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.... Waldman is skilled at building momentum and tension through intricacies of plot. The book shines whenever the group is together, concocting plans to better their working conditions, resisting and influencing one another in search of a shared sense of hope.--Alexandra Chang "New York Times Book Review"

Graced with the psychological acuity that distinguished its predecessor.--Maureen Corrigan "NPR"

Could not be more fascinating or more fun.-- "People"

The dramatic irony instills this comic novel's small-time escapades with a potent and lingering feeling of injustice.--Sam Sacks "Wall Street Journal"

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.--Bethanne Patrick "Los Angeles Times"

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

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.--Taylor Antrim "Vogue"

Lively [and] humane.-- "Economist"

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.--Tom Socca "Air Mail"

An immersive, deeply affecting human drama.-- "Bookseller"

A bracing and worthwhile glimpse of the high stakes faced by low-wage workers.-- "Publishers Weekly"

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, author of A Calling for Charlie Barnes

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, author of Raising Raffi

What a gorgeous and ingenious and heartfelt work Help Wanted is!--Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame

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, author of Our Country Friends

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, author of the North Bath trilogy and Empire Falls

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, author of Alice & Oliver

Waldman refreshes the social novel's insistence on the necessity of seeing past the conventional or obvious to a more fine-grained yet elusive reality.... Help Wanted washes labor in a stately, almost Steinbeckian light, emphasizing its difficulty but also its dignity.--Katy Waldman "The New Yorker"

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. It's a funny novel, as well as deeply humane and very angry.... [I]t also reads, with a frightening lack of irony, as a message from America itself. Help wanted. The question is, who's listening?--Kevin Power "Guardian"