Weekend Update

 Recent Reading

Help Wanted, published March 5, 2024.

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman has the clarity of a fable. I enjoyed reading it both as social commentary and as a good story of individuals struggling to make it in a society that hasn’t given them many opportunities. Virtually the entire novel takes place in the present time (mid-2020s) in a big-box store, part of a chain called Town Square that resembles a Target. It’s located in a middle-sized town that was once much more prosperous, and neither the town nor the store is as nice as it used to be. The novel is written with a good sense of humor and plenty of irony, though my summary doesn’t especially show this.

The employees at Town Square represent a slice of American life. The novel focuses on one group, which is responsible for unloading the trucks that bring the merchandise every day. As they appeared to their boss in their morning meeting:  “The diversity of race, gender, and ethnicity in the faces before him would have filled the headmaster of an elite private school with envy.” (p. 28) The characters, though each is fully portrayed, also seem to me to represent a set of types in our society. They realize this, and show it — for example, “Val threw her head back and laughed breezily, the way she imagined people do at fancy cocktail parties.” (p. 237)

The characters have a variety of reasons for being employed by a corporation that underpays them, makes sure that they don’t work enough hours to qualify for benefits or overtime pay, and gives raises that barely cover inflation. They are highly aware that there are not enough of them to restock shelves or assist customers effectively, particularly not to the standards they would set for themselves. This mistreatment of employees was intentional; further, the corporate policy of understaffing the store was purposely unacknowledged: “To keep customers from recognizing that the lack of employees on the sales floor was a deliberate choice, corporate constantly posted large banners reading help wanted—the implication being that any lack of staff on hand was a function of the tight labor market and/or a lazy populace’s unwillingness to work service jobs.” (p. 150)

Most of the characters have varying degrees of self-awareness and they are highly conscious of the way society has limited their options. They also see their own shortcomings. For example, Diego, an immigrant from Central America, considers why the white people seem to him to be better off, to live in houses that their parents or grandparents have owned, and to be better able to cope with their poor wages and lacking benefits. “Diego thought of a conversation he’d had with a guy named Isaac who used to work with them. Isaac had said that even at a store like Town Square, where they’re all paid shit, white people were still better off than black people. It was part of a bigger, historical picture, Isaac said. … When the jobs started to go away and wages started to fall, it was like a game of musical chairs. The people who already had stuff—white people—got a chair. Black people were left standing, with nothing but our civil rights.” (p. 175-176)

Each character has his or her own problems: some drink, some take drugs, some lose their tempers too readily, most have problems with spouses or partners, they never get enough sleep, and one has trouble reading because she suffered from lead poisoning from substandard housing during her childhood. All of them are struggling to provide themselves and their families with food and shelter, and often work a second job besides the one at Town Square. Mostly, they wish they could provide their children and partners with more extras such as a birthday party at Chuckie Cheese or good toys, or more healthful food. 

Most of the workers had higher aspirations when they were younger, and are slowly sinking into hopelessness. They all worry that they will never advance, even at Town Square. They feel held back because they haven’t finished college or never went to college at all or in fact didn’t even have a high school diploma or GED. For example, “What did Nicole know about college? Nicole’s own line on the subject had long been: Of course she wasn’t going—she’d barely gone to high school, and that had been free. Why would she pay to go to more school?” (p. 164)

The plot of Help Wanted centers on an announcement that the store manager is about to be transferred to a much-preferable location, and thus there will be an internal promotion of one of the lower-level managers. The employees at the center of the story decide that they would like their own manager to be promoted, not because she’s competent or likable (she’s neither one), but because they want to get rid of her. They know they will be interviewed by visitors from the corporate headquarters, to ask them what kind of leadership and initiative she has. Obviously, I’m not going to tell how this comes out, but I do recommend reading this very well-done fable for our time.

The Guardian reviewer says:

 

“Help Wanted is an acidic comedy about contemporary American serfs. It’s a kind of communal novel about the people clinging to the bottom of the social cliff: the two-jobbers, the drop-outs, the working poor. … A superb, empathic comedy of manners …. 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.” (source)

 

Other books reviewed this week

On TV this week

Agatha Christie’s novel Murder is Easy was published in 1939, and it follows the conventions of a mystery where the detective thought he was an innocent bystander to events (specifically, murders) that he did not cause, and in which he has no stake. Christie was remarkably inventive, and was a master of many plot types in her mysteries. This is definitely a good one, with a whole series of murders that are more and more apparently done by one truly evil criminal. It’s been remade into any number of TV and movie adaptations, and we recently watched the latest one, which was released in 2023.

This newest version of Murder is Easy introduces a radical change in Christie’s plot: the person who is dragged into investigating and solving the murder is not a professional detective, but is a newly arrived Nigerian man, Luke Fitzwilliam, who is about to take a job in the British foreign office. He meets an elderly woman on a train, and she enlists his help because she says she must get to Scotland Yard and get help putting a stop to a series of murders that are happening in her village. The next thing that happens is that right in front of Luke she is knocked down and killed by a hit-and-run driver. But he — and we, the audience — know that it couldn’t have been an accident. As another famous detective (quoting Shakespeare) said: “The Game’s Afoot!”

The date for this new dramatization of Murder is Easy has been moved to 1954, which was a time when Nigeria was working towards independence from British rule; it achieved independence in 1960. This revision enables the script writers to introduce a fascinating characterization of Luke Fitzwilliam, who becomes the central character in the drama. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that he penetrates the relationships and motives of the village people and figures out the identity of the evil mastermind.

The reaction to the arrival of a black African in the English village shows the varying views of the local people — some more bigoted than others.The introduction of racism to the Agatha-Christie-typical environment is an interesting twist added to their reaction to the uninvited investigator. For a Christie fan, it’s also a delicious interpolation into her oeuvre, as her books and her attitudes often embodied a good deal of racism, both explicit and implicit. (See this article for a recent attempt to clean up this issue in her books for new edition: “Agatha Christie Novels Reworked…”) 

Springtime in the woods

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Shared with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.