Help Wanted
One of Barack Obama’s recommended books for Summer 2024 • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • An Economist, VOGUE and Vulture Best Book of the Year So Far • People’s Book of the Week • One of New York Magazine’s “23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024.” • One of ELLE’s Best (and Most Anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024 • A LitHub and Kirkus Most Anticipated Book of 2024 • One of Lilith’s “21 Books We Want to Read in 2024.” • One of Time Magazine’s “13 Books You Should Read in March.” • One of The Washington Post’s “10 Noteworthy books for March.” • One of The Week’s “5 Thought-Provoking Books to Read in March.”
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.
Praise & Reviews
“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 literary history and has more in common with the works of George Eliot and Jane Austen than most novels published today.”
—Emily Gould, New York Magazine
“Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious…While Nathaniel P. delighted me with its uncanny familiarity, this new novel thrilled me for the opposite reason. It depicts a universe that my privileged cohort encounters all the time but often doesn’t really understand, at least in the granular way that Waldman portrays it, and that rarely makes its way into fiction… I doubt there are many authors who could write a literary critique of neoliberalism as breezy and almost sitcom-like as Help Wanted.”
― Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
“Great workplace novels are few and far between (it’s been a while since 2006’s Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris), and great workplace novels that deal with social and economic class in our country are even rarer. However, Waldman (The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., 2013) adds a rare entry to the workplace canon with this wise, funny story of an upstate New York big-box store and an opportunity that sends its employees scurrying for advancement.”
—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
“A superb, empathic comedy of manners… 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. The title refers to bogus ads stuck up around Town Square (the company won’t hire new staff: too costly). But it also reads, with a frightening lack of irony, as a message from America itself. Help wanted. The question is, who’s listening?”
—Kevin Power, The Guardian
“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…You’re primed to expect a novel that is glaringly different from Nathaniel P., and Help Wanted, which outstrips its predecessor technically, emotionally, and spiritually…rewards those expectations …[I]t launches a broader social critique under the guise of a fizzy caper.”
—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
“If you want to read a novel in this election year about everyday life for low-paid Americans, then Help Wanted should be at the top of your reading list… Its characters work unloading stock at Town Square, a fictional superstore in the equally fictional Potterstown, New York… but their experiences resonate beyond its garishly lit aisles and reveal much about what F Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the dark fields of the republic.’… It’s like the TV drama Succession except with more likeable characters and pay grades that are unimaginably different.”
—Max Liu, Financial Times
“Life behind the scenes of big-box retail is plumbed with wit, wisdom and humanity in this fresh workplace drama. When rumors swirl of an opening at the top of the heap in the team who works the store overnight, the secret dreams of some of the workers become crafty schemes. Waldman’s depiction of the routines, backstories and relationships among a group of wonderfully believable characters could not be more fun.”
–People Magazine (Book of the Week)
“Sociologically astute, deeply humane, and cleverly plotted.…In the venerable tradition of social novels such as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Help Wanted draws attention to moral issues raised by systemic exploitation of the working poor. The marvel is that Waldman manages to do so with an engaging, lightly satirical touch.”
― Heller McAlpin, The 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
“In Adelle Waldman’s fleet-footed novel…a box store of declining fortunes in upstate New York…proves to be a crucible of ambition and survival.”
—Taylor Antrim, Vogue
“A lively, humane book.”
—The Economist (One of the best books of 2024 so far)
“The dramatic irony instills this comic novel’s small-time escapades with a potent and lingering feeling of injustice.”
― Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Waldman, best-selling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., endearingly portrays the struggles and dreams of everyday people who are trying to make life a little better.”
— Becky Meloan, The Washington Post
“Whereas Waldman went narrow in the cultural purview of her first book, she has gone wide now…If Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was a comedy of manners, 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, The Atlantic
“Waldman observes her characters with the hilarious, remorseless precision real people use on real people … [Her] briskly roving point of view captures the constant squeeze on everyone.”
–Tom Scocca, Air Mail
“The workplace dramedy of the year.”
― Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Adelle Waldman’s new novel 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 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. When the book came to an end, I felt bereft. Adelle Waldman is a master.”
― Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or
“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, failing to see that late capitalism and office politics have a very different ending in store for them. Yet even as the frustrations mount and the 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 simply never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered.”
― Joshua Ferris, author of A Calling for Charlie Barnes
“Help Wanted is a serious moral inquiry, through the medium of fiction, into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store in an American town that has seen better days. It’s a book 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. This book should be assigned in business schools, but it won’t be; the world it depicts is not the one dreamt of in their philosophy.”
― 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 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