The post-1945 American novel was usually in some deep way about anxiety: the anxiety of living in America, with its enormous postwar wealth and its correspondingly enormous social pressures and opportunities. The great hope of its characters, like the great hope of America generally, used to lie in social mobility: up, up, and away! But in the 21st century, to hear young writers tell it, the social pressures have won. Anxiety, in the contemporary American novel, has given way to defeatism and pointillist satire: finely honed accounts of a calcified class system, or of its guilt-stricken bourgeois-bohemian alternatives (see the current crop of Berlin expat novels).
We know what has happened. The increasing concentration of resources in the hands of a tiny cluster of gargantuan corporations; the transfer of manufacturing operations from the American heartland to China and the Global South, where labour is cheap; the rise of online retail, with its seductive conveniences and its indifference to the environment … the postwar social tapestry has been unravelled. Luxury at the top, fear in the middle, serfdom at the bottom, and nobody going anywhere: this is the reality with which the novelist of contemporary American life must wrestle.
Of course, Edith Wharton and Henry James did OK writing finely honed accounts of a calcified class system. Rigid hierarchies tend to provoke novels of manners – novels that thrive on rules, novels that are, in a sense, about rules. Adelle Waldman’s second novel is such a book. Help Wanted surely qualifies as “long-awaited”, since Waldman’s brilliant debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, came out in 2013. Nathaniel P was also, in its way, a novel of manners; specifically, it was a vivisection of the male ego, performed via a portrait of the titular Nathaniel, a young novelist who makes everything, including the feelings of the women he sleeps with, all about him.
Help Wanted is an equally 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. There is no protagonist as such; the novel head-hops in a way that Henry James would disapprove of but that enacts a politics of shared experience, very much to the novel’s point.
The main characters all work for Town Square, a big-box mega-retailer not unlike Walmart. (Waldman worked at one such store for a period while she was writing the novel.) The book focuses on Team Movement, which is Town Square’s “fun and modern” name for logistics: the people who unpack delivery trucks before dawn and “break out” the boxes to line the shelves. 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 the ways in which contemporary American life constitutes, designedly, a trap for the economically disadvantaged.
The members of Movement live and work in Potterstown, NY – the name evoking Pottersville, the banker-ravaged dystopia from It’s a Wonderful Life. Potterstown has been gutted by the closure of its IBM factory. Many of the Movement employees work two jobs to stay afloat: Little Will, the group manager, does landscaping on the side; Ruby, a black woman whose son is in prison, does shifts at a co-op supermarket. Town Square’s careful meanness – shrinking hours off-season, using technicalities to withhold bonuses and promotions – makes double-jobbing a necessity.
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?
• Help Wanted is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
