A Conversation with Adelle Waldman

Her new novel, "Help Wanted," is out now

This conversation series continues with Adelle Waldman, the author of the new novel Help Wanted. Waldman, as interviewers have noted already, published a novel that is a notable departure from her prior work, the best-selling The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. While her zeitgeist-seizing debut skewered the Brooklyn literati and proved to be one of the more significant American social novels of the twenty-first century, Help Wanted is something else entirely: a striking portrait of low-wage workers at a big box store in upstate New York. Waldman herself worked in one, and drew on those experiences to render a world rarely understood by the affluent literary community, one existing at a remove from the struggles of the working class. Waldman herself is not of that class—we get to that in our conversation—but she was willing, unlike most contemporary writers, to tackle subject matter that is usually nowhere near the pages of a prestige 2020s novel.

You spent six months at a big box store as research for Help Wanted. You’re a novelist, obviously, so this question might be pedantic, but why the novel vs. the memoir? What is it that a novel can do that the memoir can’t?

I really like this question. The reason is that I didn’t want to write a book—whether fiction or memoir—that had at its center a middle-class writer who got a job on the graveyard shift at a big-box store. My own thoughts and reactions to the job or to my co-workers were not as interesting to me as the workplace itself, its culture. I was interested in creating a fictional world that was realistic in its essentials but also vivid and complex, not in foregrounding the observations or feelings of a writer/observer.

One subtle theme of Help Wanted is how workers won’t even consider trying to unionize, out of fear that the company will crack down on them. Tell me about your decision to include these hints at unionization without pulling the plot in that direction—a major push against corporate to whip workers together, as some have tried at Amazon?

I thought that a novel organized around an effort to unionize would run the risk of being too simple and didactic. It would have good guys (workers) and bad guys (corporate), but there would be little to surprise the reader. I wanted to come up with a plot that laid bare the economic injustice my characters are subject to, but that was also a little more indirect. Ultimately, I organized the novel around a scheme the workers hatch to try and get their irritating and incompetent boss promoted, the idea being that in her new, more elevated position, she’ll be too busy to bother them. Another benefit is that her promotion would open up a management slot that one of them might get. For both these reasons, the workers spend much of the book making their idiotic boss look brilliant to corporate. This plot allowed me to showcase the protagonists’ humor and creativity—I wanted them to come across as not just exploited workers, but also as people with agency and the capacity to be both strategic and harebrained—while also keeping the focus on their economic situation. (The reason they are eager for a management job is that it means a steady forty hours of work a week—something none of them currently get—and guaranteed benefits.) I certainly hope readers come away with a sharpened sense of injustice on the workers’ behalf and a renewed belief in the need for strong unions. The novel’s construction reflects not a lack of interest in that aspect of their situation but a belief in Emily Dickinson’s dictum: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

You’ve spoken about the success of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P and the struggle to write another novel that held meaning for you. What was it like to follow-up such a novel about the Brooklyn literati and how much of a struggle was it to find the story that would become Help Wanted? When you went to work at the big box store, did you think, “I will write a novel about this!”

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was published in 2013. In the years after, the world caught on fire. Or rather a fire that had been smoldering for some time became impossible to ignore. The world is still on fire. Our collective mood reflects this: a sense of unease and fear for the future has, I think, become part of day-to-day life. Under these circumstances it felt myopic to write about anything but the fire. In this sense, Help Wanted is my version of a Trump novel, although Trump’s name never appears in it.

It’s a Trump novel all the same. After all, periods of growing economic inequality have tended historically to coincide with a loss of confidence in elite institutions and the rise of strongmen politicians. To my mind, the position we find ourselves in now is largely a result of our nation having, over the past forty or fifty years, scrapped social democracy and New Deal-era (or New Deal-inspired) policies that prioritized good, livable jobs for ordinary Americans; broke up budding monopolies; and combated excessive financialization. Instead, we embraced neoliberalism, an ethos that prioritizes growth at the expense of pretty much everything else, the underlying idea being that a larger pie will ultimately benefit everyone, including the middle- and working-class. We’ve had forty years to see how well this has worked out.

And yes, I know many people will point out that the U.S. economy did grow faster in the neoliberal era than it had in the sluggish 1970s. Growth is the justification for everything else: the rise in inequality and the fact that so many parts of our country have been hollowed out and whole swaths of the population—those who lack a college degree—have by and large done worse. But I would argue that neoliberalism hasn’t brought about nearly as much real economic growth as conventional wisdom would have us believe.

I hope my novel shows, in microcosm, the way some of what looks like growth on paper derives from wealth transfers from poor to rich. Labor arbitrage has all too frequently been a substitute for real innovation: why, for example, should a corporation spend on r&d that might never pay off when it can increase profitability immediately by firing full-time workers with benefits and replacing them with part-timers? Or—moving away from the particular world of my novel—consider the barrage of news reports that seem to come with more and more frequency about private equity firms buying hospital chains or nursing homes and making them more profitable by cutting staff and reducing the quality of care? On paper, this is “growth”; in reality the only people who benefit are the fund’s investors, whose profit comes from siphoning money previously spent on providing better quality care to patients. This is a sort of efficiency, I suppose, but not one most people would find desirable. Another example comes from a book my husband, Evan Hughes, wrote about a start-up pharmaceutical company that worked hard—and creatively—to ensure its dangerous, fentanyl-based product would be widely prescribed, regardless of whether patients would benefit. (His book is called Pain Hustlers; it has since been adapted into a film by Netflix.) We’re told that our high drug prices incentivize pharmaceutical companies to develop new, life-saving drugs—but as Evan’s book shows, high drug prices are just as likely to incentivize firms to come up with new and innovative ways to market existing drugs to patients who don’t need them.

I’m not saying that there was no real growth or innovation in the neoliberal era. Of course not. But I think the idea there is a simple trade-off between growth/innovation on the one hand and equality/sustainability on the other, and so we had to sacrifice certain good things in order to maximize others, is false. It’s worth noting just how many innovations came out of the New Deal era—space travel, the Internet, television, to name a few. Zachary Carter’s excellent 2020 biography of John Maynard Keynes, The Price of Peace, made a point that has stayed with me. Keynes argued that the conditions that give rise to innovation are not those that neoliberalism sought to bring back from the pre-Depression era: de-regulation, a laissez-faire approach to the economy. Keynes died before the post-war boom, so it speaks to his foresight that he argued that the conditions necessary to maximize innovation are mass purchasing power combined with social equality—i.e., widespread access to both education and leisure—because they provide talented individuals from all strata with the tools to think creatively and create a large pool of potential buyers for the things they come up with.

I think we live in an age of great naivete, where a simplistic belief in markets as the end-all and be-all has become dogma in the minds of many of our elites. And I think that’s how we got into the hole we’re in. I too believe in capitalism—but a healthy, sustainable economy requires not only markets but countervailing powers, such as strong labor unions, and the existence of certain nonnegotiable, bedrock principles that are enshrined by law, including fair pay for workers—even if that means corporate profits are reduced slightly as a result. (As Adam Smith said, “The rate of profit is highest in countries which are going fastest to ruin.”)

Aside from a few real and significant bright spots in terms of Biden’s NLRB and the FTC, I think the contemporary U.S. has more in common with the dystopian Pottersville from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” than many upper and upper-middle class Americans—who have done well in the neoliberal era—would like to believe. I think the most important project of our time is to try to move toward something that looks more like the healthier, more equitable—and happier—Bedford Falls, with its thriving Main Street and multiple power centers.

How did you decide to structure the novel? You hop among various character perspectives in the third person, employing a form of free indirect discourse. We hear from the most desperate of the working class, as well as those closer to the comfortable middle.

I’m an avid reader of 19th century novels, which tend in general to be much looser in terms of point-of-view than contemporary ones. Jane Austen and George Eliot, for example, frequently move between omniscient narration and close-third person. Because those authors are my touchstones, it’s natural for me to be loose with p.o.v. myself. I allowed myself to choose what I thought was interesting over what was structurally neat—that is, I entered the mind of whichever character’s perspective or voice I thought would be most revealing or fun or useful in that particular moment, without following any sort of rigid set of rules, in which, for example, each chapter is told from start to finish from the vantage point of one character.

Once you knew you wanted to write about the plight of big box store workers, how long did it take you to produce the novel you wanted? What was your writing process?

I’m very slow. It took five and a half years in total.

It took me about a year to come up with the caper-ish, get-the-bad-boss-promoted plot. After I came up with the plot, the material began to fall into place. I produced a draft fairly quickly, in a few months. But it was a very rough draft. At that point, I had no idea how to write a caper of this sort. My previous novel had been so different—it was told from a single point-of-view, following the rise and fall of a single and rather ordinary relationship, etc. I spent the next four years working on the pacing, trying to make the book as tight and fun and suspenseful as I could, while also fleshing out the characters, to make them as vivid and distinct and lifelike as possible.

There’s a debate, not as loud as it used to be, about authenticity. “Only X type of person should tell X type of story.” How conscious were you of that? How did you, a celebrated novelist working the early shift at a big box store, push past that to write this book?

In retrospect I wasn’t as nervous about this as you might think. I went into the project thinking about books by Ted Conover and Barbara Ehrenreich, both of whom immersed themselves in different environments and wrote nonfiction accounts. (Conover wrote about riding the rails with transients and about spending a year working as a prison guard, among other things; Ehrenreich worked a series of low-wage jobs and struggled to make ends meet on her earnings for her seminal work, Nickel and Dimed). With those writers in mind, doing what I did didn’t seem that out of the ordinary.

By the time I realized that in today’s environment my project might be seen as risky or out-of-step with current mores, I was too committed to this story and to these characters to ever consider backing away from it. It may sound grandiose, but I felt strongly that my very small story about a few workers’ at one big box store in upstate New York was a way of telling a much larger story, about the decline of the middle-class society many of us grew up in and would like to think we still live in, even as our current economy has become increasingly dystopian for swaths of the population. In this context, it seemed worth running certain risks and not being overly careerist or cautious.

What was the reaction to the novel like from your old co-workers? Did you model the stories in the novel on their stories at all?

I’m wary of talking too much about my co-workers because I don’t want to turn them into anecdotes. I will say that when I told them I was a novelist, they were very surprised but very supportive. While the book tries to be as accurate as possible about the essential truths of the modern workplace, its plot is entirely fictional.

Do you think Help Wanted offers what might be missing, to an extent, from American fiction today—characters who genuinely belong to the working class? You aren’t one of them, yet consciously chose to tell a story that was nothing like the milieu you had known in Brooklyn. How much were you thinking about representation in that regard—the desire to delve into a world that usually doesn’t make it into modern fiction?

For better or for worse, I wasn’t thinking that theoretically. I think the truest thing I can say is what I said above, that this was my version of a Trump novel. I wasn’t trying to do something different from other novels per se—I was trying to say something that I think is both true and urgent about the world as it is now. The approach I took felt to me like it would be more effective than writing a novel about a writer/Hillary voter sitting in her house and wondering why Trump got elected.

It might be too soon to ask, but what’s next? Do you have another novel in mind?

I have a yearning, borne perhaps out of listening to too many political podcasts in the past couple years, to write about intellectuals and their ideas—not to make an argument, or advocate for the rightness of my own set of ideas, but to explore the interplay of psychology and personality with intellectual and political thinking, the way Tolstoy does so well in the beginning of Anna Karenina, when he describes how Oblonsky’s political views change with the times, without his ever being aware that he’s changed his mind or revised his opinion, any more than he is aware of changing the cut of his suits, but somehow his suits, like his beliefs, are always in keeping with the current fashion. But that’s pretty general, I know. I don’t yet have anything as concrete as a plot. Or characters. Or a setting.

Who are your favorite contemporary novelists?

I’m very lucky that several of my favorite novelists (and one of my favorite nonfiction writers) blurbed this book. They’re Elif Batuman, Keith Gessen, Gary Shteyngart, Josh Ferris, Richard Russo, Charles Bock and Michelle Orange.