Help Wanted is perfect for a book club discussion because, in my group, some people really liked it, while others really didn’t! One member confessed she had given up after several attempts to read it. Another ploughed on but didn’t like it, while two people really enjoyed reading it.
I fell somewhere in the middle of the opinions on Help Wanted. I didn’t love it, but there were plenty of aspects I enjoyed, and I wasn’t sorry I’d read it. The book is the long-awaited second novel from Adelle Waldman. Her first, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was published in 2013 to great acclaim and is a story about literary types living in Brooklyn. I haven’t read it, but those characters couldn’t sound more different from the cast that populates Help Wanted.
This story is about the motley crew of folks who make up the Movement Team at Town Square Store #1512 in Potterstown, a small town in upstate New York. Town Square is clearly a thinly disguised Walmart or Target. Movement is the more upbeat way that ‘Corporate’ has rebranded the logistics team, who come into the store at 4am every day to unload a massive truck and get its contents onto the shop’s shelves.
Help Wanted fairly quickly introduces the reader to all of the characters, which I found a bit hard going. I had to flip back and forth a bit to keep track of each of their stories. But once they were established, that became easier, and I became invested in the lives of many of them.
Because most of the characters in Help Wanted don’t have easy lives. Many of them have at least two jobs, some are using food stamps to supplement meagre earnings, while another can’t use his phone until his next paycheck enables him to buy more credit. And I think this is probably why Adelle Waldman wrote this book. To shine a light on the lives of the unseen retail workers who toil away behind the scenes of big box stores across America.
Help Wanted refers to the signage that Corporate has decided to display in the stores. They want to give the impression that the lack of staff to help customers is because there is no one available to employ. In reality, staffing numbers have been cut. Other appalling behaviour by Corporate includes deliberately cutting staff hours to avoid them working enough to qualify for healthcare cover.
Yet despite this, the Movement employees actually like working at Town Square. It’s better than their other jobs, and they are a team. One that becomes stronger as a result of the main plot of Help Wanted. A scheme to get rid of their loathed boss, Meredith, by getting her promoted!
The scheme emerges after the team learns that popular store manager Big Will is leaving. If Meredith gets his job, she’ll be further removed from them; their beloved group manager, Little Will (neither of the Wills is named because of their actual size), will get her job; and one of the Movement Team will get a promotion to group manager. What could possibly go wrong?
It’s the plot that provides the humour in Help Wanted, though, it wasn’t as funny as I was expecting it to be. It was more of an insight into a world that I knew very little about. One populated by a team called Nicole, Ruby, Diego, Val, Milo, Joyce, Travis, Raymond and Callie, whose fictional lives represent thousands of people I’ll never meet, but the thought of whom will stay with me for a long time.
As with many of the books I read, I borrowed Help Wanted from my local library, but it’s also available from bookshops, including the charity Oxfam, which is Europe’s biggest retailer of second-hand books. For more book reviews, visit the Books section of my blog.