Review: Adelle Waldman's Help Wanted

The novelist Adelle Waldman has lately been in a situation that other writers both envy and fear: she’s released a long-awaited follow-up to a remarkably successful first novel.

Waldman is the author of 2013’s much-imitated The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., a story about literary types living in Brooklyn that earned the love of both that type of person and the type of person who loves to hate them. The book’s great accomplishment was an exquisitely tuned sense of authorial judgment, one which frequently lampooned the pretension and lack of self-knowledge of its self-important characters while never seeming to take the easy way out by making caricatures of them. Protagonist Nate Piven, the titular Nathaniel P., is possessed of an infuriating and remarkably true-to-life combination of outsized self-regard and perpetual insecurity. His burgeoning success as a writer makes him enviable to his peers, many of whom are chasing the same kind of success, and yet every step he takes up the ladder leaves him more consumed with the feelings of inadequacy that he’s working hard to scrub from his persona. Nate gets himself into a series of awkward situations, thanks to the titular love affairs, his elevated ambitions, and the various petty jealousies of his peers. Like any comedy of manners, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. succeeded as well as it did - it was both a critical smash and sold very well for a literary novel - because it was both a portrait of a very specific time but also timeless. The novel was a reflection of a small, self-obsessed slice of humanity; the NYT review stressed how Nate cut a familiar figure. Yet you leave the novel understanding that its characters were simply playing the same games people of that age have always played.

And, yes, Nate and his peers are subject to some pretty blistering satire, much of it owing to Nate’s inability to process anyone else’s feelings without running them through the filter of his own. Yet the digs never feel personal. To make a weird comparison, Waldman’s narrative perspective in Nathaniel P. reminds me of Freud writing about his patients: there are all the parts common to judging, but there is no judgment, only clinical observation.

If that all sounds Discourse-y, you’re right! I’m sure there’s already readers scrambling to the comments to say that this all sounds insufferable. (The Goodreads reviews for the book are a shambles.) Nathaniel P. generated a mountain of coverage for two dovetailing reasons: it described a kind of person that many people love to hate while inspiring feelings of queasy self-identification among people who would like to think they could never be a Nate P. In a typical scene, he’s either doing something that’s unlikable or demonstrating the kind of self-consciousness about status and appearance that many of us find viscerally annoying even when not doing anything else wrong. Nate has hit upon recent success as a writer that has made him more desirable in the sexual marketplace of literary Brooklyn, and while he’s not a predator, he’s also all too aware of his newfound powers. He is, in other words, a member of that reviled but essential category, the unlikable protagonist. And a lot of people just inherently struggle with that; I know people who love books and are sophisticated readers who will just tell you straight out that they can’t handle unsympathetic protagonists. But, while Nathan is frequently irritating, and a number of his relationships are insincere and transactional, and I’m glad he’s not dating my sister, he’s never sinister. He just doesn’t know how to pursue what he wants romantically and sexually after being socialized into a world where feminist norms have taught him more about what he must not do than what he should do.

In any event, Nathaniel P. was a sensation; it also described a world that was already just about dead by the time it was released. Certainly there are still annoying literary types in Brooklyn and elsewhere. But the much-mocked “hipster” archetype hung around as a punching bag far longer than the actual organic social scene it described. By 2013 Williamsburg had already become a ludicrously pricey playground for uncool types with too much money who were chasing the fumes of the prior decade’s moment or rich parents who needed convenient L train access to Manhattan. The people who had made up the scene had mostly all gone on to lucrative jobs in the square world and started families or had been forced to decamp for cheaper climes. The opening of the Williamsburg Whole Foods in 2016 has been represented by some as the final nail in the coffin for what “Williamsburg” had once meant, which is annoying but not untrue. That was, somehow, almost eight years ago, and since then we’ve had Bernie’s effect on young people’s politics, and President Trump, and MeToo, and Covid19, and George Floyd…. It’s been a long time for new cultural touchstones to emerge, and anyway, I doubt Waldman had any interest in mining that territory again. Which is why I say that, in publishing her new novel Help Wanted, Waldman is in a position that’s both enviable and scary - a very successful first novel launches a career, and it’s also something to live up to.

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The characters in Help Wanted are about as far from the concerns of 2000s literary Brooklynites as you might imagine, though those groups are closer in income than some in the latter world would like to let on. Help Wanted tells the story of the interlocking lives of workers at a big box store called Town Square. The book chronicles the various challenges of a diverse cast of characters who work in logistics, the behind-the-scenes busywork that makes that sort of mammoth store function, principally the endless tasks of receiving trucks, unloading them, breaking down boxes of items, helping ensure that those items are inventoried and tracked in the company’s system, and getting them to the right shelf, by itself an immense amount of work. (Some of Walmart’s “supercenters” take up as much as 250,000 square feet.) There are a variety of characters in the team, some of whom take up more of our attention than others, principally Little Will, whose name is not a comment on his physical stature but rather to distinguish him in the Byzantine hierarchy of Town Square. (The average Target probably has about 200 or so employees, although such jobs are highly seasonal, which factors into the plot of Help Wanted.) But there is no one main character here, which befits the book’s interest in the fundamental averageness of what it depicts. The book has a polemical side, and yet there’s something soothing about its relentless mundanity.

Not to fixate too much on the first book, but this distributed protagonist setup is clearly another way Help Wanted breaks from its predecessor: though told in third person, Nate’s consciousness is suffocating in Nathaniel P. How he’s feeling is everywhere you turn, which is where the critique comes in; Nate is a not-bad guy who cannot comprehend the degree to which he casts other people as roles in the movie in his head. In Help Wanted the focus is on systems, most obviously the store as a large system of interlocking points, and also on America’s class system, and so on. Another is the way that the perspectives of these people, who know each other only by necessity, intersect and overlap and function as a team. Which brings us to the plot, not just as in “the book’s plot” but in regards to the plot hatched by the characters. Driven to distraction by their casually vindictive new boss Meredith, the logistics team settle on a funny and bittersweet way to get rid of her: get her promoted. They work together on this task with the same sort of exhausted determination that they bring to their work at Town Square. (As is commonly the case in real life, these workers arrive before 4AM, given how much has to be unpacked and sorted prior to the arrival of customers.) Getting rid of their adversary by helping her advance even farther over their heads in the business is a grimly comic encapsulation of what Help Wanted is all about. And it’s a good note to help understand that the book is frequently quietly outraged at the treatment of these low-waged workers, but knows how to have fun.

It’s a book filled with grace notes. The corporate decision to change the name of the team that unloads trucks and gets items onto shelves to “Team Movement” is pitch-perfect; it’s exactly the kind of sunny gloss management likes to put on drudgery. I suppose you could also call it a little on the nose - the people in Team Movement, after all, are stuck, stuck in a shitty job, stuck in bad relationships, stuck in addiction, stuck in debt. But the book simply wouldn’t work if it didn’t effectively satirize the mandatory positivity that this kind of business enforces on its workers, and none of those notes rang false for me. And there’s something admirable about themes being as unguarded as they frequently are in Help Wanted. One of Town Square’s cast of characters is a former star college athlete who had dreams of something bigger, only to find himself in a job that he very recently would have found beneath him. The commonplace of fleeting athletic success and the person shellshocked by losing it is a very simple and unfussy microcosm of the big mass of dashed dreams that the Town Square workers quietly mourn. I appreciate how direct it all is.

I think my favorite element of Help Wanted is the procedural elements of big box store life, the actual work. I’m someone who’s addicted to YouTube videos that demonstrate process, even processes that produce outcomes that are not interesting to me. I watch a lot of videos teaching how to cook particular dishes; I like to cook, but usually I’m not watching to learn myself but just to watch someone do something that involves a lot of intricate steps. I enjoy videos about repairing retro computers, making wooden furniture, and grooming dogs for the same reason. Help Wanted gives you a good bit of exposure to the work that goes on behind the scenes at one of these giant stores, with a sense of how intricate all of it really is. It makes sense, when you think about it, to devote time to the way that items manufactured in China a few weeks earlier and sent across the ocean in giant container ships come to be in the exact right spot in the exact right aisle, sorted just above where the right little faded price sticker sits. After all, these stores largely prefer to keep that hidden work hidden. The sheer number of products sold at a Target or Walmart or Costco is so immense, and the need to put them in places where customers can find them so obvious, that it’s odd to think that most of us know so little about the logistical challenges involved.

So, what didn’t I like. Well, I do think that while the distributed narrative attention is necessary for the book to make the points it’s making, there is at times a scattershot feeling when it comes to who we’re following and why. Sometimes I just wanted to follow one character and was annoyed to find that I had to read about two others to get back to that one. And (as was inevitable) not all of the characters feel as filled-out and lived as others. The diversity of the characters and their points of view is a real strength, and it’s precisely the kind of plot-dependent and unfussy diversity that has the most value, but there can be a box-checking feeling to this element. You know there’s going to be a single mother struggling to keep her kid on the right track as she hustles to pay the rent, and sure enough there is. While they’re filled with flaws, Waldman clearly has affection for the workers at Town Square, and perhaps perhaps perhaps they are at times a little too noble for the novel’s good.

Which points towards a whole discussion about authorial relationships to character, here in the 21st century, that I’d love to skip but feel like I can’t. As you know, I am exceedingly unimpressed with the concept of cultural appropriation, which seeks to render impermissible that process which underlies all human creation. I’m sure some people on Tumblr or Twitter are yammering about how Waldman is telling a story that isn’t hers to tell, but honestly, who cares. (If there is no effort to bridge social distance by imagining the lives of others, there is no such thing as the American novel.) Still, there’s some fertile ground to be had comparing Waldman’s first novel to her new one, and I would be lying if I said that Help Wanted never had me feeling a little apprehensive. I think the book’s intense focus on the plight of characters who exist in a different social strata than Waldman - a difference that is more cultural than economic, but economic too - can’t help but provoke concerns about lifestyle voyeurism. But then that’s an inevitable function of today’ complicated rules about depiction and appropriation and similar. I guess you might say that Waldman’s affection towards her characters is both authentic and, on a meta level, self-defensive. Waldman thinks well of her characters in Help Wanted, but their relative social position means that she’s constrained in how she depicts them - she likes them, but is unwilling to dislike them the way she disliked those in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., whom she may not have liked but certainly understood.

This is the paradox of the egalitarian’s view from above. Waldman’s respect for her working-class characters is obvious and sincere, as evidenced by the text itself and by this profile in The Cut. What nagged at me over the course of the novel was the sense that her generosity towards her big-box worker characters only reinforces the class divide between them. Nathaniel P’s characters were periodically skewered, and while that treatment may have been cutting, it also implies a certain level of equality between author and character. Nathaniel P’s annoying literary types are satirized because they are seen as legitimate targets and legitimate targets because they are on Waldman’s level. Help Wanted’s characters, with the exception of the villainous Meredith - a woman who is sometimes diabolical but always human and tellingly, at least on some level, in a similar social rank as Waldman - are not subject to satiric critique. They make bad choices and are sometimes exasperating, but their flaws are ultimately a product of systems and circumstance. Nate, in the first novel, is allowed to just be a selfish asshole, and though we judge him we do so on his level.

Had Waldman treated her characters with the same gentle disdain as she did her characters in Nathaniel P, she would certainly have been accused of punching down. But you cannot avoid “punching down” without a confident sense of in which direction “down” lies. If you see what I mean.

The implied self-knowledge about class is fine, even essential. You don’t get rich writing the kind of books that Waldman writes, even those as widely-esteemed as Nathanial P., but certainly her strong literary reputation demonstrates various types of social capital that she simply has and the average Walmart worker simply does not. And, I stress, it would do no one any good to pretend otherwise. But the fact is that the characters in Waldman’s first book, though frequently unsympathetic, were characters Waldman was… willing to render unsympathetic. She is largely not willing when it comes to the characters in her second, who are sometimes self-sabotaging and who do some unpleasant things but whom you as a reader reflexively sympathize with, and in there somewhere is a dissertation on American class relations. The whole book is intimately and inextricably sewn through with productive class tensions and nods to various markers of income and wealth. I’ve seen several people online commenting that Town Square is more like a fictional Target than like a fictional Walmart, and though this likely means little for workers, there’s always been a sense in which Target is the store for the upper class of the lower classes. You don’t get to explore those issues without diving into differences in class. All I’m suggesting is that the book’s relationship towards its own characters is, in its own way, another expression of those differences.

Of course, were this a brutal satire of people making $12.50 an hour, that would present its own problems, worse ones. It’s not an easy square to circle. And there’s been many ham-handed attempts to dramatize the lives of those in lower class strata, in the past. I often think of movies from the 1990s in which, in a bid to demonstrate how not-racist they were, filmmakers portrayed an endless array of impossibly noble Black men characters; obviously, these characters were not actually an alternative to racism but an expression of it. They were always in some sense powerless, sexless. (The virtuous Black man in the 1991 weeper Fried Green Tomatoes is literally mute.) Waldman is of course nothing like this crude, and indeed, this is the heart of Help Wanted, the sketching of characters who are both sympathetic and flawed, whose problems are ultimately structural problems of the kind of people that get left behind in our system. I don’t think Waldman has pulled off the balancing act perfectly, but in fairness neither has anyone else. And you can see the dilemma - while the reaction to her first novel was overwhelmingly positive, she was criticized by some for depicting the lives of those perceived to be too privileged to pay attention to, and is now criticized for appropriating the story of those with too little privilege. I think we really don’t have the slightest idea what we want with these ideas of appropriation and identity, and Help Wanted succeeds as well as it could have, while performing the permanently-useful job of portraying people whose lives are rarely dramatized.

I am far from the first to note that Waldman could have easily just come back, after ten years, with the same kind of novel as her first, with Even More Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., another look at the mores of characters who are upper-class in their tastes and education if not in their bank accounts. Maybe this time it would have been aspiring filmmakers in Silver Lake or ambitious academics in Princeton. That book wouldn’t have sold as well as its predecessor, the New Yorker might have relegated it to the Honorable Mentions section of its annual best book list, but it would have been safe and would have sold well enough to earn a big advance on her next book and maybe somebody would have gotten a movie made out of it this time. It’s clear that, after the runaway success of The Loves of Nathaniel P., she wanted to write characters that were not like her, characters whose lives were not like hers. In ways both comfortable and not, she’s succeeded.