Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman
No job too small.
Happy New Year everyone! I’ve started 2025 with Help Wanted, the second novel by Adelle Waldman. They1 say that you spend New Year’s Eve the way you’ll spend the incoming year, and if so, one could do much worse than this humorous, emotional, insightful, and undeniably human story.
Seeing as this is our first review together, I thought a small diversion to how I come across the books I read is warranted. There are three main sources I use to find things to read:
Other readers
They each serve in different ways. StoryGraph2 provides recommendations based on plot and characters, comparing them to other books you’ve read and rated, so it’s more of a personalized experience. Tertulia3 is a great interface for getting recommendations from other readers, critics, award nominees/winners, celebrity book lists (Thanks, Obama), and the like. Finally, Bookstagram always has some interesting insights and picks, and with some minor effort you can curate the list of your follows to almost always be on your wavelength. Usually I will peruse all three of these sources, and then invariably read some random book I’ve never heard of that popped up on none of them.
I believe Help Wanted was found through Tertulia, but I can’t say for sure. My apologies.4
Spoiler-Free Summary
Help Wanted concerns the employees of a fictional big-box store, “Town Square” (think a Walmart, Target, Costco, etc) in upstate New York. When they learn of an upcoming power vacuum in the store’s management and the shake-up this will cause among the store’s employee hierarchy, they form a plan to direct the outcome of this situation. The novel follows the workers over the course of a week, give or take, from when they learn of the shake-up until its eventual resolution.
But really, the book is barely about that at all.
Instead, this is a novel about people. The people of Town Square, the circumstances that lead them to this small window we get into their lives, and the forces that steer them forward (or, sadly, backward). Some of those forces are external: other employees, store management, family, the corporate office; while others are internal: their own history, weaknesses, strengths, and misconceptions.
Help Wanted is about sonder, the “realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”.
The Good
Adelle Waldman does something really interesting and effective in Help Wanted. There’s no protagonist, and no real antagonist either5, which I rather enjoy in general. Remember that Blues Traveler song that no one could get out of their head for a few months in the 90s? There’s a line in it that applies: “Like a bad play, where the heroes are right, and nobody thinks or expects too much.” If your audience isn’t rooting for your villain at least a little bit, you’ve missed the mark.
The real interesting thing here though is how deftly Waldman moves between points of view. There’s no waiting for a chapter or section break here. We sometimes switch POV in mid-paragraph! Keeping that up, while the characters stay fully formed, viewpoints effectively balanced, and plot clear, is nothing short of a magic trick. It works very well in this novel, as much of the drama and narrative weight comes from the interpersonal relationships, and this dextrous acrobatic act of jumping between character’s minds keeps that going at a strong clip.
Speaking of a strong clip, this book is devoid of fat. At 261 pages, I devoured the book in 4 1/2 hours. If you went to a particularly boring wedding, you could finish Help Wanted before they cut the cake. Almost every sentence is meaningful and serves a character or the plot, and Waldman’s sharp prose makes each one delicious.6
Finally, Help Wanted is funny. Very much so, and in a way that is not slapstick or exaggerated. The humor seems to originate from the characters themselves, as though only they could have dreamt up the bit in question. To my recollection, there’s never a point where Waldman seems to drop her characters in a wacky situation and see what happens. Rather, the characters are funny because many of them are just that, whether that be as a coping mechanism, a cultivated trait, or just an unconscious by-product of their station.
The Bad
If you’re someone who reads books mainly for plot, Help Wanted might not satisfy. The plot, if we are defining it strictly as a sequence of events, is thin. A store manager is transferring away from the store, some vacancies will need to be filled, and they are. That’s really the crux of it. The only tension that stems from the plot itself is who will take those spots. Perhaps if you find human resources thrilling, this sounds like an action thriller to you. For the rest of us without brain damage, it is not.
For me, this was not an issue because this is a character-driven story. The plot is there to support our deeper understanding of these characters, by placing a bit of strain on them to see how they handle it and each other.
Still, if there is a negative to be had, the actual plot of the book is wanting.
One more thing - there is a scene in the novel where members of the corporate office are dining with the upper management of the store. I felt the dialog here was just a touch heavy-handed and shading just slightly towards caricature. As I roll it over in my mind, I think that the rest of the dialog in the book was so natural that even the smallest deviation thereof can be felt. It’s certainly not egregious.
Personal Experience
Have you ever taken a long drive and gotten to a particularly quiet stretch of road where there’s no town in sight, when all of a sudden you see a lone house on a hillside? No other sign of human activity around, just a single house, like someone was painting a landscape and a drop of paint landed right on the middle of the canvas. I’ve always wondered who lives in those houses. How did they get there? Why did they stay there? What is their day like?
Help Wanted made me feel like I was able to inhabit the lives of people that I, perhaps shamefully, would otherwise have overlooked. These are the real people of today, in a modern situation, that we (I) often take for granted. It’s easy to think that many of our every day conveniences are just there, but there are human beings making that possible, with hopes and disappointments and families and needs and interests and history and love and hobbies and intelligence and aspirations and…
This novel brings them to life in a full and vivid way. I felt more connected to the people around us by reading it.
Highlighted Passage
Bookly allows you to save quotes/words/thoughts that stand out to you while you read. I’ll try to share any that I save in these reviews. For this one:
“Then Nicole would not only be stuck in retail, she wouldn’t even have what she had now - the belief, in the back of her mind, that she could leave for someplace better whenever she wanted, that being here was her choice.”
I felt embarassed when I read that, as I know that exact feeling all too well.
Should You Read This?
Final Rating and Thoughts
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman, you have received a prestigious honor, one that is so coveted, authors are scared to even ask me for it7. You have received…
Four out of five big-box store cardboard boxes!
Ultimately, Help Wanted is a moving story about modern-day humanity, the resilience of spirit, the drive to survive, and the shedding of assumptions about those around us.
Like I said. Sonder.
What’s Next?
Next up I’ll be reading:
Join me, if you’d like!
Oh, and obligatory:
I’ve no idea who they are.
If you don’t know StoryGraph, it is the brainchild of Nadia Odunayo, their sole developer, which is insane when you consider the thought and functionality built in. It’s often billed as a GoodReads alternative, which is akin to saying the space shuttle was a horse and buggy alternative. The only downside is that it doesn’t automatically track progress if you’re reading on a Kindle the way GoodReads (an Amazon product) does, but there are much better ways to track your reading anyway, my favorite among them being Bookly.
A book marketplace, if we’re being technical, but with such a dedicated focus on helping people find their next great read that the marketplace is nearly an afterthought.
This is also a fun tool that allows you to read the first page of a book without knowing the title or author yet, to see if you like it without the biases we all have. Fun to play around with.
I guess Meredith could be fit this role, but ultimately I think we learn that she’s no more of a villain than any of our “heroes”. If you had to choose an antagonist, you’d probably have to settle on the corporate office, but even there we see glimmers of humanity and decent intention.
I realize this paragraph is almost entirely food references. Perhaps I need a snack.
At least, I assume that’s why they haven’t asked…?