Q&A with Adelle Waldman

 

 

Adelle Waldman is the author of the new novel Help Wanted. She also has written the novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. She lives in New York state.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Help Wanted, and how was the book's title chosen?

 

A: Help Wanted is set at a fictional big-box store, and is about the people who work there.

 

The book was, in a very real sense, inspired by the 2016 presidential election. Like so many others, I was thrown for a loop. I found myself uninterested in writing another novel about the romantic and psychological problems of middle-class.

 

Instead I decided to write about low-wage work. I think the staggering decline in both job quality and pay for Americans without college degrees over the past 30 or 40 years—a period when the fortunes of those at the top have risen dramatically—is not only unconscionable but has paved the way to the political situation we find ourselves in now, where large numbers of Americans distrust the leadership of both parties, and not without some reason.

 

I cast about for a while before I came up with Help Wanted as a title, but I liked it immediately because it does several things at once: it suggests a workplace novel, and specifically a blue-collar workplace, and it’s light. It telegraphs that the book is intended to be fun and funny.

 

To me, that was crucial—I wanted to write a book about low-wage workers that doesn’t shrink from showing how dire their economic circumstances are but that nevertheless is an appealing read, a book with life and humor and twists and turns, as well as memorable characters. I crafted the book to be something of a caper. 

 

Q: In The Atlantic, Jordan Kisner wrote of the book, “Whereas Waldman went narrow in the cultural purview of her first book, she has gone wide now…If Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was a comedy of manners, Help Wanted is a tragedy of circumstance…” What do you think of that assessment, and how would you compare the two books?

 

A: I think it’s very accurate. In The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., I dissected an individual’s psychology—the book was a closeup examination of Nate’s mindset, the way he thought about women, how he saw himself, his conscience and his moral life.

 

In Help Wanted, that analytical focus is largely directed not toward a person but toward the store itself. I wanted to paint a hyper-realistic picture of retail work today and the internal life of a big-box store.

I wanted to be fair—I didn’t want to exaggerate or make Town Square, the fictional retailer, cartoonishly evil—but I wanted also to show the ways in which it, like most other public companies, is under increasing pressure to reduce labor costs in order to increase profits and please investors.

 

While the cast of characters who populate Help Wanted are central to the book—I hope readers like them as much as I do—it’s the store itself and the larger system in which it operates that the novel aims to subtly and fairly critique, or at least hold up to the light for scrutiny.

 

Q: Did you know how Help Wanted would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I did know how it would end, but I nevertheless made a ton of changes. I’m an obsessive reviser in general, and with this book in particular.

 

Help Wanted revolves around a caper-ish plot: the group of workers who are its center have a bad supervisor, an annoying, incompetent micromanager. She’s bringing them down.

 

When they learn that the store manager is leaving, and their boss is up for his job, their first impulse is to undermine her because they dislike her.

 

Then they realize that helping her get promoted to store manager might not only be their best chance for getting her off their backs—as store manager, she’d be too high up on the food chain to bother with them—it would also free up a lower-level management slot for one of them.

 

That would be life-changing for whoever got it—that person would get a steady 40 hours of work a week, something that none of the rank-and-file gets, as well as benefits. So they hatch a scheme to make their incompetent boss look brilliant.

 

I liked that this plot brings some levity to the book and allows me to treat the workers not just as victims of economic exploitation—even though they are being exploited—but as people with agency and humor and the ability to be strategic and/or harebrained. I think it also brings a lightness to a book that has some serious themes running through it.

 

But I’d never written a caper before and had to teach myself how, by writing draft after draft, in which I made many cuts and alternations in an effort to keep the pace brisk without giving short shrift to characterization or the book’s deeper aims.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: I hope they come away with a renewed understanding of how hard so many Americans work and for how little—not just how little money, but how little security, the constant anxiety that hovers over them.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I haven’t yet started another novel, but I have a few smaller projects in the pipeline.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Adelle Waldman.