Help Wanted: A Novel

One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Summer
A Best Book of the Year in Vogue, Vulture, Elle, and Economist
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

“Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious.” —Michelle Goldberg, New York Times

From the best-selling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. comes a funny, eye-opening tale of work in contemporary America.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"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?" "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." "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." "Sociologically astute, deeply humane, and cleverly plotted." "Could not be more fascinating or more fun." "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." "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." "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." "Graced with the psychological acuity that distinguished its predecessor." "The dramatic irony instills this comic novel’s small-time escapades with a potent and lingering feeling of injustice." "A shrewd workplace comedy that never makes low-wage workers or the issues they face the punchline." "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." "Lively [and] humane." "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." "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." "An immersive, deeply affecting human drama." "The workplace dramedy of the year." "With great compassion and humility.… Waldman shines a much-needed spotlight on the inequities of corporate retail policies and practices." "A bracing and worthwhile glimpse of the high stakes faced by low-wage workers." "Tightly plotted, slyly caustic and often very funny, it’s hugely enjoyable." "Sharply observed…Waldman’s writing is richest and most humane as she traces each worker’s private ambitions." "A smart satire of skulduggery and drudgery." "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." "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." "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." "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." "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." "What a gorgeous and ingenious and heartfelt work Help Wanted is!" "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." "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." "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."