To write ‘Help Wanted’, author Adelle Waldman spent six months working in a warehouse

Towards the end of Adelle Waldman’s novel Help Wanted, Big Will, store manager of Town Square in Potterstown, is out for dinner with colleagues from the corporate headquarters. Corporate is changing the shift timings for the logistics team, and Big Will is nervous about how the employees will react to the news. Sensing his apprehension, Katherine from Corporate assures him that “our employees are remarkably resilient. That’s one of the things I admire most about them”.

This statement, thrown as carelessly as the peanut shells that diners in said restaurant are encouraged to fling on the floor for “ambience”, sums up the kind of capitalist callousness that the author tries to address in Help Wanted, The Nod Book Club’s pick for October.

Waldman’s second novel after 2013’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.—a book about a bunch of badly behaved Brooklyn literary types—Help Wanted is set in a completely different milieu. The venue for the events playing out in Help Wanted is Town Square, a big-box store in Potterstown in upstate New York. In Potterstown, jobs are scarce after IBM, the community’s largest employer, has packed up and left. The focus is on the nine employees unloading deliveries in the warehouse in the 4-to-8 am shift who make up Team Movement (formerly Logistics, which was discarded because some consultants deemed ‘Movement’ more “fun” and “modern”). Their executive manager is Meredith, the archetype of the unlikeable boss—controlling, paranoid, lacking empathy. When word goes around that Meredith could be promoted to store manager, the nine of them agree to aid her promotion in the hope that she’ll be removed from their day-to-day lives, and, as a chain of events, one of them might be up for a promotion.

As Team Movement put their heads together against (for?) a common enemy, their own personal ambitions come to the fore, and we get a glimpse into their lives, quirks, fears, and motivations.

You can say Help Wanted is a novel about people, but it’s also a novel about the larger system that exploits them. However, while the setting seems grim, there’s fun and laughter too. There’s Milo who thinks The Simpsons is a love story or Callie, the new joinee, who’s studying to become a sleep technologist.

Over a video call, Waldman, who lives in New York State, discusses what sparked the idea for the novel, red herrings, and the 19th-century writers who inspire her:

As part of the research for Help Wanted, you spent six months working in the warehouse of a retail store. Subject-wise, the book is quite the departure from your first novel. What sparked the idea for Help Wanted?

In a word, Trump, honestly. Politics in the US just took a turn that made me feel like I didn’t want to spend a few years thinking about the personal problems of middle-class or upper-class people.

It was clear that a lot of Americans were unhappy with how things were going. To me it seemed like the world I knew—my family, my friends, people who had gone to college and who had professional jobs—were doing fine. But I had this feeling this might not be representative of the country as a whole and I just thought something I could do was try to broaden my own experience and knowledge.

I got this idea to get a job, just a different kind of job. I didn’t know for sure it would lead to a novel. I thought maybe I would have a co-worker who would have this really interesting life story that would be really different from the life stories of people I tend to know, and they would give me permission to fictionalise it. Instead, what happened is that I got to the store and I very quickly felt like, no, I want to write a book about the store, set it in the store.

Was there a specific discovery that set you off?

I would say there were two different things, and they’re pretty different. But both were really, really important and made me think that this has to be a novel about the store.

I thought the store was just a great setting for a novel. It occurred to me just how novelistically rich it was. The group of workers I write about come in in the middle of the night and there was just this picture of this big, empty store in the middle of the night with the lights on dim and this group of people—all different ages and races and ethnicities and genders and sexualities—just unpacking consumer goods in the middle of the night.

And then my co-workers just turned out to be sharp and funny and really good at mimicking our annoying boss. There’s intrigue and inside jokes. So, there’s that, the positive.

But then, I did go in with certain ideas I had from having been a business reporter for newspapers. I had certain ideas about people who are stuck in jobs like this—that they’re perhaps unreliable and that’s why they’re not moving up and that maybe there’s a lot of turnover.

Instead, I got to the store and my co-workers just turned out to be so incredibly hardworking. Our shift started at 4 am, but people would get to work by at least 3:45 am to put their stuff away and be ready to sign in by 3:55, because that’s when you could start getting paid.

And I saw that despite how reliable, hardworking, and good at their jobs my co-workers were, there were almost no opportunities for advancement, because the way these stores work is that there’s a need for very few managers and many more worker bees. And so, the store has to invent reasons to not promote people—like, oh, you need a college degree to be a manager.

Also, the workers have zero control over their hours. The store schedules them for as many—or as few—hours as the store wants. So, if business is slow, you might only get one or two shifts a week, which is four or eight hours. If things are busy, you might get 39 hours a week. If you get over 40, you have to be paid overtime; the store did not want that.

Despite the workers constantly being short-changed by their employers, and the challenges that they face, there’s a constant thread of humour running through the novel. Meredith with her ‘Smart Huddle’, corporate frowning over the word “insubordination”… Was it a conscious choice to make humour a crucial component of the story?

Yes, definitely. And it goes back to my impressions of the store and my actual co-workers—that they were so funny. And that was part of the appeal of the store as a setting for a novel. On the one end, there was economic exploitation. But on the other hand, there were people who have rich inner lives and humour and aspirations. So, I thought the humour was important, both for the accuracy of what I experienced, making the book fun to read from a reader’s perspective and also just in terms of not presenting the characters as being just poor people or victims of exploitation, because no one is just that.

How long did it take you to write the book?

It took me, honestly, about a year after I left the store to really make progress on the book. I probably had tens of thousands of words, but they were just scenes of life in the store. What it didn’t have was a plot. I almost despaired and gave up on the project.

But then I thought, okay, if you want to write a novel about the economic circumstances, how do you do that? Like, what if the store is threatened with closure because it’s not making money, and everybody is reacting to that? But that just felt a little obvious, sad without being interesting. I thought about a plot around a union drive, but again it seemed too simple, like the good guys and the bad guys.

This was about a year of false starts. And then I got this idea that came out of nowhere: to have a crazy plot where the workers would have this bad boss—in this case, Meredith. You know she’s not evil. She’s an annoying, incompetent, micromanage-y boss, but the workers get this idea that if they can get her promoted, then they’ll get her off their backs. And then one of them could have a chance to move up. I thought this scheme is perfect, because it allows me to foreground this economic thing, to show why they want to move up so much, why management jobs are so rare and precious, and how much it means to them to just get a stable job, or they know how they’re going to be working 40 hours a week, and they know they’re going to get health insurance and benefits.

So, besides the economic stuff, it allowed me to foreground the humour, because there’s just something so cockamamie and counterintuitive about this scheme of trying to get make their bad boss look brilliant to get her promoted. It just gave them agency.

Once I had the plot, I started to make more progress, but it was still another several years.

Meredith is the central character around whom the novel coalesces. She’s a terrible boss: she calls employees “slow”, refuses leave requests, thinks she’s in her “egg-breaking phase” of her work omelette. She also, unwittingly, unites her team, who want her off their backs. What was the idea behind creating Meredith?

The way I see her in the structure of the book is almost like, if this were a mystery novel, she’s a red herring. The workers of Team Movement, in the beginning of the book, think their problem is Meredith. And so, they are really focussed on getting rid of her. And as readers, we trust them on this. But I think as the book progresses, we gradually realise that while Meredith is annoying, unfortunately, their problems go beyond Meredith. You remove Meredith and they’re still in a bad situation.

In a mystery, you think one person is the murderer, but it’s really someone else. And in this case, we all think the problem is Meredith, but, really, the problem is a larger system.

Who’s the character in Help Wanted you enjoyed writing the most?

I think Milo was super fun to write about. He’s so eccentric. Milo is someone who maybe lacks certain social skills. He’s immature and self-involved, but he’s also creative and energetic. So, he amuses himself at work by doing things like his performance art. When the group is unloading the truck, he picks the boxes in a certain order to tell a story. And I think I find this very charming, compelling and funny. But I also think Milo was a sad character to write about because he’s sort of sweet but he can’t get out of his head. You can also see why his co-workers find him a little hard to deal with. They like him—love him even—but there’s an immaturity.

Through the book, you tackle a lot of big issues—the decline of retail culture, capitalism, the economy, race, and immigration—while also dealing with the inner lives and motivations of your characters. Was that challenging?

That was one of the biggest challenges of this book. I doubted the project so many times, that maybe a novel is not the right place for this. Most of the time when we talk about the political economy or the evolution of retail, we do it in a non-fiction format. But because I am a novelist, I thought, well, there’s plenty of people writing excellent nonfiction about all this stuff, but maybe if I could do it in a different way, I could reach people differently.

It was a challenge to just try to integrate a story that felt like an organic story about people but also got at these larger issues, where it didn’t feel fake or inserted. In this corporation, no one in either the management or corporate has any desire to hurt the workers on a personal level out of malice. They’re operating as part of a system where they’re a publicly traded company. They want to have higher profits, which means reducing labour costs. That’s what Wall Street wants to see. That’s what the business press wants to see.

My method was to try to tell the story fairly and accurately, keep my editorial opinions out of it, but try to give what I thought was necessary context about the situation that retail is in. For example, the competition from online retailers. And hopefully in doing so, I find a balance between the parts that are about issues and the parts that are more about people. It was tricky to pull off. I don’t know that I got it just right.

Who are the writers that you love?

I love 19th-century fiction. And I think it’s in part because of an emphasis on character analysis, a sort of moral lens where characters are evaluated in terms of certain moral characteristics that I think have gone out of fashion.

I love George Eliot; Middlemarch is still probably my most favourite book ever. I also love Jane Austen. I like Tolstoy. A tonne of 20th or later fiction I like tends to have a lot in common with older fiction. For me, Edith Wharton is very relatable, more so than perhaps Hemingway. Hemingway was fine, I guess, but Hemingway feels like a 20th-century writer. Wharton came a little bit earlier, but I relate more to Wharton, not because she writes about upper-class Americans but because of how she writes the kind of rich analysis rather than the more terse descriptions that we associate with Hemingway. I know it seems kind of funny. Because, on the surface, what do these books have to do with like low-wage workers of today?

There is a 19th-century British writer named Elizabeth Gaskell whom I also really like, who did write more explicitly about labour issues in novels like North and South and Mary Barton. Those are the books that I love best.

Among contemporary writers, I’m a huge Jonathan Franzen fan, but really, my great love is 19th-century novels.