Book Review: Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman
By Simon Demetriou
If you’re a corporation that wants to convince your customers that you’re a company on the up, and that the absence of workers on the shop floor is definitely not a deliberate cost-cutting measure, what do you do? Easy. Put up a bunch of ‘large banners reading help wanted’. It’s this kind of barely-trying-to-conceal-itself smoke-and-mirrors cynicism that Adelle Waldman takes aim at in her working-class workplace novel, Help Wanted.
Our characters are the members of ‘Movement’, the trendified name that big-box department store Town Square has given to its logistics department. These are the people who show up to store #1512 in Potterstown, NY at 04.00, unload the trucks, break out the boxes, throw away the mountains of plastic waste so that only the eco-friendly packaging remains on the shop floor, stock the shelves and hangers, and then head off to their second jobs because that’s the only way they’re able to provide for themselves and their families.
As well as being part of Movement, each character also craves some kind of movement – either up or out. When they learn that the store manager position is opening up, the team plot to engineer the promotion of their despised executive manager, Meredith, to set off a chain reaction of promotions that will filter down to at least one of them. As the characters dare to hope, we are given snapshots of why these hopes mean so much to each of them, from paying for after-school activities for their children, to straightening out a life derailed by jail-time.
The premise of Waldman’s novel is a good one: an important ideological statement with a plot that lends itself to both tenderness and satire. But, for this reader at any rate, Help Wanted doesn’t deliver. Because the novel jumps from character to character, and because there are 10 central characters in a novel of under 300 pages, we only get sketches, mere snatches of lives. They’re mostly good sketches, particularly those of the callously ambitious Meredith, and the hapless, embittered and relentlessly self-involved Milo (whose job it is to throw the boxes off the truck). But when a book is trying to do something important, you want it to stay with you; you want to carry it around long after you’ve put the book down. Sadly, what could and should have been a powerful indictment of corporate soullessness and wage slavery in late-stage capitalism ends up being, well, forgettable.