Intelligencer - Adelle Waldman Takes the Early Shift

When Adelle Waldman’s daughter was 21 months old, she would wake at 2:30 a.m. to nurse her, take a shower, then drive from her house in Rhinebeck to the big-box store across the Hudson, arriving early enough to stash her belongings in a locker and clock in before her shift from 4 to 8 a.m. (One time, she got a speeding ticket because she didn’t want to get written up for being late.) She would then join her team in spending the next four hours unloading a truck full of boxes, then dispersing its contents throughout the store. There was one 15-minute break halfway through the shift, and they would smoke cigarettes to help them stay awake. As we share American Spirits on the smoke-break bench outside the store one afternoon in late January, Waldman tells me everything else about the six months she spent at this job, the seed of her new novel, Help Wanted.

A stint at a $12.25-an-hour part-time job upstate was a long way from the scene-y events that greeted the publication of Waldman’s first novel a decade ago. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was praised almost universally by reviewers and included on nearly every notable and best list. On then-ascendant Twitter and at media parties, it was, for a time, all anyone could talk about. Does anyone know who its protagonist, Nate Piven, is based on? Nate is a Brooklyn debut novelist who has total contempt for women yet perpetually attracts them, even though they should be too smart to fall for his bullshit. It wasn’t any one guy, of course. It was all of those guys, and in the character of Nate Piven, Waldman captured them with laser-guided precision and just enough empathy to make readers care.

Help Wanted, by contrast, is much wider in scope and aim. Like The Office in its universal workplace humor and even more like Mike White’s Enlightened in its textured portrayal of how small humiliations and injustices at work inevitably boil over into righteous rage, Help Wanted feels at once familiar yet revelatory in its specificity. Set at Town Square, also known as “the store” — a fictional big-box retailer in a fictional upstate town — the book begins by introducing us to the store’s Movement team, ten very different people united in their desperate need for regular schedules, more hours, and benefits, all of which are denied to them by store policies gleefully enforced by their comically terrible, stripy-highlighted, high-strung boss Meredith. When Meredith is up for a promotion, the team members’ initial impulse is to do everything they can to tank her chances, until one worker plants a revolutionary idea in their heads. What if, instead of being honest about Meredith’s incompetence, the team conspires to praise her to the skies? That way, she’d be out of their hair, managing the whole store, and potentially clear the way for a more humane supervisor — maybe even one of their own. The remaining questions, which play out over the bulk of 274 fast-paced pages, are about whether all the team members will get onboard with the conspiracy, whether it will work, and which team member (if any) will get their shot at what pathetically passes for the American Dream (being paid fairly to wake up in the middle of the night to supervise people tossing boxes off a truck).

How did the writer of a novel that precisely described the parties and bedrooms of literary Brooklyn transform into the writer of Help Wanted, a deeply political yet highly readable story about the lives of low-wage workers? The answer might be that the novels have more in common than is readily apparent, despite their very different settings; both of them capture a world and a moment in time in a way that’s become unstylish in recent literary history and has more in common with the works of George Eliot and Jane Austen than most novels published today.

Waldman grew up outside Baltimore and attended a Quaker high school before going to Brown, where she quickly became disillusioned with what she describes as “the idea that we were all radical and reading Foucault and critical of power but at the same time we were planning to work in finance or management consulting or at the very least go to law school.” She dropped out for a while and moved to Tucson, where she waitressed in a pizza joint and unexpectedly fell in love with the 19th-century character analysis of Eliot and Austen and Gaskell and Brontë. After a stint in newspaper journalism in her 20s, she settled into a career of occasional literary criticism, undergirded by SAT tutoring for wealthy Upper East Siders. During the Great Recession, Waldman briefly worried that her tutoring clients’ parents would be suddenly immiserated, eliminating that income, but the bankers, of course, turned out to be fine. She tried and failed to sell a book before starting what would become Nathaniel P. in 2008. Eight agents rejected it before Elyse Cheney agreed to represent her. When it sold in 2012 for $200,000, she was 35 and had been struggling for years to find her place in the literary world. The novel’s publication created a seismic shift in Waldman’s life and the way she saw herself.

Waldman is, in physicality and demeanor, an unprepossessing, deceptively neutral-seeming person: white with straight brown hair and an open, pleasant face and manner. A casting agency could place her as a middle-school teacher or an office manager. Over lunch at a tavern near the big-box store that formerly employed her, she describes being surprised and, since she is by nature private and reserved, a little bit concerned by the outsize reaction to her book. She was so afraid of public speaking she had avoided giving any kind of toast at her 2010 wedding. “I feel like I’d go to parties and I was just this quiet person in the back of the room. I had no M.F.A. from a fancy place or done any fancy jobs.”

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