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Michelle Goldberg
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
A good friend of mine, when talking about the New York dating landscape that led her to choose single motherhood, often refers to Adelle Waldman’s 2013 novel, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” An unromantic comedy, the book is a note-perfect depiction of Obama-era literary Brooklyn and the Ivy-educated cads who think of themselves as sensitive and enlightened even as they treat women as disposable.
It was a big hit, making lots of year-end best-of lists and inspiring a bunch of way-we-live-now essays, themselves relics of a bygone time when elite culture was coherent enough to have zeitgeist-defining novels.
But instead of capitalizing on her sudden stardom, Waldman didn’t publish another novel for more than a decade. “To my surprise, I just didn’t have another idea,” she told me over lunch near her house in the Hudson Valley town of Rhinebeck. Especially after the shock of Donald Trump’s election, she lost interest in exploring the romantic and psychological struggles of the upper middle class. So in 2018, not knowing what to write about instead, she got a job unloading trucks at a nearby Target, vaguely hoping to find inspiration in the lives of people far outside her own milieu. At first, her shift started at 6 a.m.; then management abruptly changed it to two hours earlier. “The thing that took me by surprise,” she said, was how quickly the workplace itself captured her imagination: “I’ve got to write about this.”
The result is the poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious “Help Wanted,” which follows a group of low-wage part-time employees at a Target-like big box store as they scheme to rid themselves of their toxic manager and secure a promotion for one of their own. While “Nathaniel P.” had delighted me with its uncanny familiarity, this new novel thrilled me for the opposite reason. It depicts a universe that my privileged cohort encounters all the time but often doesn’t really understand, at least in the granular way that Waldman portrays it, and that rarely makes its way into fiction.
Reading it, I kept thinking how odd it is that so few contemporary novels have as their theme the structure of the modern economy, including the decline of brick-and-mortar retailing and the corrosive effects of the just-in-time scheduling.
Part of the reason, surely, is that it’s hard to make such stories entertaining. I doubt there are many authors who could write a literary critique of neoliberalism as breezy and almost sitcom-like as “Help Wanted.” There’s also the fact that the publishing industry is dominated by the sort of expensively educated people who populated Waldman’s first book, and both editors and readers naturally gravitate toward narratives they can relate to. But there’s a third reason that novels grappling with big questions of political economy have become relatively rare: the widespread worry that writing outside one’s own experience will be met with condemnation, a concern that at times made this latest project feel risky for Waldman.
“Help Wanted” is a polyphonic novel whose point of view shifts among various workers on a team whose diversity, as a manager thinks to himself, “would have filled the headmaster of an elite private school with envy.” The characters include a middle-aged Black woman with an incarcerated son, a gay former teenage runaway with a wife and baby, and a Honduran immigrant supporting his bipolar girlfriend.
When Waldman started working on the book, in 2018, her friends were encouraging, imagining a fictional analogue to Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed,” for which the author went undercover working a series of grueling, low-wage jobs. Then came 2020 and the backlash against “American Dirt,” a book by a white woman — though one with a Puerto Rican grandmother — about Mexican migrants fleeing cartel violence that was lambasted for being exploitative and full of stereotypes.
Critics of “American Dirt” were generally careful to say that the problem was not that its author had ventured beyond her own identity but that she’d done it badly. Nevertheless, in publishing there was a widespread sense — intensifying after that summer’s racial justice protests — that writers who attempt to inhabit the perspectives of the less privileged risked ruinous accusations of cultural appropriation.
“Suddenly my friends were like, ‘Are you sure about this?’” Waldman recalled of that turning point in 2020. “The mood just totally changed.” But she was committed to the story she was telling. “I just had to take my chances.”
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that, amid this growing anxiety about authenticity, there was a boom in autofiction, or fiction rooted in autobiography, and a decline in more panoramic novels about American life.
“The gatekeeping in fiction, as you know, is the M.F.A. program,” the novelist Gary Shteyngart, a friend of Waldman’s who teaches in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University, told me. “Most of my students are in their 20s. Maybe some of them have had some kind of job here or there. But for the most part, there’s a lot of people who haven’t had a kind of traditional work life. So their first book can be somewhat autobiographical, right? And then they become a part of the academic publishing complex. And that’s what they write about.”
Waldman’s new book, by contrast, is “a book about labor that Henry Roth would have been proud of,” he said. “It’s about money in our society and what our society does to its lower-middle- and low-class rungs.”
Given that Waldman doesn’t share her characters’ backgrounds, Shteyngart was curious about how it would be received. “What do you think is going to happen here?” he said he’d asked her. “I don’t know. It’s really fascinating.”
So far, there hasn’t been much visible outrage. After a splashy profile of Waldman in New York magazine, illustrated by a photo of her posing amid mountains of bulk cracker boxes in a store near her home, I noticed a few snarky comments online, but they seemed to get little traction. Reader reviews on Goodreads, which can be vicious, are mostly positive.
I think you can attribute the lack of controversy, at least so far, to a few things. Social media has become so fragmented — and X, formerly Twitter, so right wing — that it’s harder for bad-faith actors to build clout by joining social justice pile-ons. There’s been a broader cultural turn against what’s often seen as left-wing stridency. And, hopefully most significantly, Waldman writes about people radically unlike herself skillfully and without condescension. When she talks about her book, she tries to avoid sounding “grandiose” for “doing a job for six months that millions of people do year in and year out.”
Maybe the book’s early reception is a sign that authors have more latitude to explore all strata of society than many have feared. In recent years, for reasons of both caution and fashion, many American writers have been looking inward. But there’s a whole big world out there, and we need novelists to help us make sense of why it’s collapsing.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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