2026 Book Review #35 – Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman
My litfic for the month, having originally ended up on my TBR because it was recommended on a substack I was reading at the time two years ago. This was a fun read, though tediously didactic at points – I think the only argument against just calling it outright propaganda is that it seems fairly hopeless about most positive political programs having much chance of changing anything.
The book is centred around the logistics – sorry, Movement – shift at a big box store in a dying post-industrial town in upstate New York. The store – an ersatz Target (which is to say, one step nicer than Walmart) – has adapted better to the area’s abrupt transition to somewhere upscale tourists stop on their way to the Catskills than most, but the fact that it’s one of the better places left to work (especially that don’t require a college degree) doesn’t make it a good one. Aside from insufficient hours, nonexistent benefits, and shifts that start a couple of hours before dawn, the Movement Team has lately suffered particularly from Meredith, their simultaneously tyrannical and incompetent new manager. But when it gets out that the store’s manager will be transferring to a better location and Meredith is one of the potential candidates to replace him, a scheme forms – lie through their teeth in interviews with corporate, sabotage her rival for the spot, and do everything else they can to get her promoted out of their hair and (they dream) one of their own number elevated into her current place.
So in terms of plot this is a workplace comedy and a bit of a farce, but the actual plot is mostly just a framing device for what the book actually cares about anyway. The overwhelming majority of the book’s time and effort is spent on capsule character studies for each member of its (sprawling) main cast, a majority of whose internal monologues conveniently include little lectures and monologues about the state of working retail and the death of the American Dream and all that other good stuff. It’s probably a sign of my fundamental lack of sophistication, but I do think this is a real weakness – the book would have been much improved with some more drama or sharper comedy or really just anything. I’ve read short stories with more incidents and progression in them. Though the utterly non-cathartic ending where exactly zero of the deeper issues were resolved did at least feel very thematically appropriate.
Thankfully, all the effort devoted to the book’s characters is at least well-spent. There are probably a few too many of them, for a book that pivots to a different one as the protagonist of each new chapter – going half the book before returning to any individual perspective means that there’s just no space to devote to development or nuance for any of them in particular. The book’s didactic goals did give the makeup of the team a bit of a box-checking feel, with each character illustrating a unique facet of the experience of trying to make a living with an inconsistent retail job. But all of that aside, the Movement Team and the supervisor and managers they’re stuck dealing with all come across as socially and psychologically real. They all have real virtues and genuine flaws, and manage to avoid the extremely real trap of becoming edifying or villainous caricatures or just bland and uncompelling case studies. Most of them are even sympathetic despite being interpersonally awful one way or another. It’s also honestly just a profound novelty to read a whole book entirely about people in the modern day without college degrees or really many of the markers of normative middle-class life.
The narrative has real empathy and time for just about every major character. The only exception is Meredith, the villainous assistant manager the whole plot is centred around. Which is basically what I would expect, except the store manager above her gets far more time spent establishing him as a basically decent (if rather lacking in moral courage or vision) guy. The representatives from Corporate might as well be aliens to the rest of the cast, but they’re still portrayed as far more competent and reasonable than Meredith. She, meanwhile, the book has active contempt for. Grasping and vainglorious yet not actually good at anything except self-presentation and office politics, bad with money and obsessed with getting the position and respect she thinks she’s due, incapable of carrying on a conversation without making it about her, and on and on it goes. This gets a bit uncomfortable given the degree to which how much time and money she spends on her appearance or the fact that she at one point failed out of beauty college are emphasized as tellingly negative or pathetic traits. Though the book doesn’t view any of its other women – either those on the Movement team or the salaried corporate professionals far above them – anywhere near as harshly. Probably better viewed as contempt towards the apparently-successful social climber more than anything.
All of which is still mostly just scaffolding and support for the book’s actual thesis: that trying to make a living working at one of these dying retail behemoths is a sucker’s game, with the scraps of opportunity and stability that remain existing more as potential to compete over than anything you will ever actually see. There is intertwined with this a profound nostalgia for the way things used to be – that conditions at these stores have been getting steadily worse, less from any real malice than the brutal realities of market competition with Amazon and similar e-commerce options that make the same offer a big box Everything Store does but better (the book is very appreciative of the irony that they are in real ways being subjected to the same processes they themselves inflicted on main street small businesses the generation before). The severe battering the book’s setting took with the de-industrialization and the macabre reality that the only ‘good’ employer left in town is a United Healthcare call centre are both dwelt upon at length. The whole thing would already have been less than subtle, but to make sure no point was missed a truly improbable number of chapters happen to include the POV musing or remembering someone else’s wisdom in a way that is almost indistinguishable from just pasting the full text of an op/ed onto the page. I’m sympathetic to most of the points being made and I still found it more than a bit exhausting.
The book could probably have stood to be longer – another 50 pages would have given time to flesh out a few of the characters or make the plot more interesting. Having a bit more faith in the reader’s ability to get the point would also have been appreciated. Still, a fairly fun and easy read
