Adelle Waldman's novel is a workplace ensemble set in a Costco-like store. But, because Help Wanted is a group portrait, it tends to visit, rather than settle in with, its working class characters.
, where a smart-but-insecure young woman named Nicole, who's a worker in a big-box store, approaches her manager to ask him what he thinks about her ambition to go to college. The manager, nicknamed"Big Will," is a good guy, but he's distracted. He's just been promoted and reassigned to another store. As Nicole sits down in Big Will's office, she notices a photo of a bunch of guys at what must have been Big Will's own college graduation.
A really good writer, like Waldman, knows when to let a moment speak for itself. By the end of that brief scene, we readers sense Nicole's aspirations have deflated, maybe for good., about a young literary hipster living in Brooklyn, was lauded for its wit and shrewdness. It's been a long wait for Waldman's second novel, which turns out to be not what I was expecting.is a workplace ensemble piece set in a Costco-like store in a Catskill-region town.
Waldman has said in interviews that she herself took a job in a big-box store for six months. Her motives seem to have been mixed: part anthropological, part practical — the income generated from her debut novel was beginning to dry up.itself is a mixed bag. As you perhaps heard in the passage above, it's graced with the psychological acuity that distinguished its predecessor. But, becauseis a group portrait, it tends to visit, rather than settle in with, its working class characters.
The overall effect is both panoramic and jumpy, not unlike the novel's opening scene in which the"team members" of"Movement" — corporate-speak for the crew that gathers every morning at 4 a.m. to meet delivery trucks — frantically unload boxes of stuff: kitty litter, shrink-wrapped lampshades, sunscreen, tiki torches, toilet paper and"single-serve Styrofoam cups of soup.
The novel's plot is, in a sense, also a collective effort. No, nobody's talkin' union. Instead, given that Big Will, the store manager, is moving on up, the workers hatch a plan to rid themselves of their own reviled division manager, a woman named Meredith. By singing her praises to corporate, they hope to get her promoted, albeit undeservedly.is an informed depiction of outsiders: hourly wage workers, mostly without benefits, who see themselves shut out of the American Dream.
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Big-box store workers find themselves shut out of the American Dream in 'Help Wanted'Adelle Waldman's novel is a workplace ensemble set in a Costco-like store. But, because Help Wanted is a group portrait, it tends to visit, rather than settle in with, its working class characters.
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