The modern workplace contains and fuels so much of our lives. Who are we when we work? What does our work say about us? It’s no surprise that fiction writers have increasingly turned to the workplace setting, using it as a reflection of society — its power dynamics and cultural shifts –  and a source of characters’ private ambitions, disillusionments, desires and fears

In Help Wanted, her long-anticipated follow-up to The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman applies her sharp sense of relational drama and dark comedy to the retail workspace

The novel is set at a branch of Town Square, a big-box store not unlike Target and Walmart, in fictional, blue-collar Potterstown, New York, a forlorn small town with a view of the Catskills, stuck in a downward spiral ever since the local IBM plant closed and a stand-in for the many economically distressed areas in the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley

The book focuses on Team Movement, which is Town Square’s “fun and modern” name for logistics, where frazzled backroom staff unload lorries, unpack merchandise and stock shelves through the night, then head off to their second jobs. The author spent six months working morning shifts at a megastore as research. “‘Roaches’ was what other employees called the people who worked Movement because they descended on the store in the dark of night, then scattered in the morning when the customers arrived.” The name is also ironic: moving is what these employees can’t do. Cancelled food stamps, crippling student loan repayments, absurd medical bills (a case of strep throat costs Raymond, a Movement worker, over a thousand dollars): step by step, Help Wanted outlines how contemporary American life constitutes, designedly, a trap for the poor

The novel revolves around 12 different perspectives, charted at the front in a pseudo-family tree. As Big Will, the store manager, thinks while surveying his crew, “The diversity of race, gender and ethnicity in the faces before him would have filled the headmaster of an elite private school with envy.” There’s Nicole, a white Potterstown local and the youngest Movement member at 23. And Ruby, a Black woman in her 40s, has worked service jobs since she was a teenager. Diego, an immigrant from Honduras, prides himself on being competent at work but struggles in his personal relationships. Val, a young lesbian mom, is ashamed of her position and desperate for professional growth

At times, the characters’ desires and hardships begin to blend into one another. Multiple Movement members struggle with alcohol, are single parents, live with parents or grandparents and have challenges in their intimate relationships. But this seems partly by design. Help Wanted is structured around the collective, depicting the toll of capitalism on low-wage workers. Hours the team gets, benefits that are cut, occasional free meals handed out, cost-cutting pressure from management, the alluring potential of promotion, the bureaucratic rules from corporate – every decision at Town Square greatly alters each person’s day-to-day life and sense of wort

When you’re trapped in a rigged system, all you can do is try to manipulate it to your advantage. Hence, the Movement workers conspire within the rules to get their hated boss, the irritating Meredith, promoted, so that one of them can take her job. A superb, empathic comedy of manners ensues. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Help Wanted is that Waldman manages, in telling her small story, to describe not just the American economic prison but the global one. So: both a novel of manners and a systems novel, a book that shows us, perhaps, how intimately linked these apparently disparate genres were all along

It’s a funny novel, as well as deeply humane and very angry. The title refers to bogus ads stuck up around Town Square (the company won’t hire new staff: too costly). But it also reads, with a frightening lack of irony, as a message from America itself. Help wanted. The question is, who’s listening?