HELP WANTED, by Adelle Waldman
GREEN DOT, by Madeleine Gray
The modern workplace contains and fuels so much of our lives. Who are we when we work? What does our work say about us? It’s no surprise that fiction writers have increasingly turned to the workplace setting, using it as a reflection of society — its power dynamics and cultural shifts — as well as a source of characters’ private ambitions, disillusionments, desires and fears.
In “Help Wanted,” her long-anticipated follow-up to “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” Adelle Waldman applies her sharp sense for relational drama and dark comedy to the retail work space.
The novel is set at a branch of Town Square, a big-box store not unlike Target, in fictional Potterstown, N.Y., a stand-in for the many economically distressed areas in the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley. It’s become a “popular summer destination for a certain type of city person (the kind who eschewed — or was priced out of — the Hamptons),” but many residents struggle to find work and stability since IBM left town.
Waldman focuses on members of “Team Movement” at Store No. 1512, who unload trucks, organize the warehouse and stock shelves before the store opens. The novel roves among 12 different perspectives, charted at the front in a pseudo-family tree. As Big Will, the store manager, thinks while surveying his crew, “The diversity of race, gender and ethnicity in the faces before him would have filled the headmaster of an elite private school with envy.” There’s Nicole, a white Potterstown local and the youngest Movement member at 23. And Ruby, a Black woman in her 40s, who has worked service jobs since she was a teenager. Diego, an immigrant from Honduras, prides himself on being competent at work, but struggles in his personal relationships. Val, a young lesbian mom, is ashamed of her position and desperate for professional growth.
At times, characters’ desires and hardships begin to blend into one another. Multiple Movement members struggle with alcohol, are single parents, live with parents or grandparents and have challenges in their intimate relationships. But this seems partly by design. “Help Wanted” is structured around the collective, depicting the toll of capitalism on low-wage workers. Hours the team gets, benefits that are cut, occasional free meals handed out, cost-cutting pressure from management, the alluring potential of promotion, the bureaucratic rules from corporate — every decision at Town Square greatly alters each person’s day-to-day life and sense of worth.
Waldman is skilled at building momentum and tension through intricacies of plot. The book shines whenever the group is together, concocting plans to better their working conditions, resisting and influencing one another in search of a shared sense of hope.
Work is less the active ingredient of Madeleine Gray’s “Green Dot” — titled after the green dot that shows a person as active on Instagram or Facebook Messenger — than it is a shadowy setup. Narrated by witty, 24-year-old Hera, the novel follows her entanglement with a married man she meets while moderating comments for an online news site.
Hera begins as aimless and disenchanted with the realities of adulthood. She’s avoided work by staying in school. Despite being smart and performing well in academic settings, she lives at home with her father without money of her own. When she secures her first job, the daily grind quickly drains Hera’s energy. The only bright spot: Arthur, an endearing older journalist who sits across from her — and happens to be married.
What starts as an exchange of silly messages quickly escalates into a deep, intimate relationship that consumes Hera’s life, and the majority of the novel: “I understand why people start wars, I understand why people blow up their lives. If the choice is this or not this, I will destroy everything else every time.” She is so self-aware of the trappings of her affair — “For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be” — that the novel can be, at times, a bit tiresome and repetitive as she waits for Arthur.
Hera’s distinctive, raw and brashly authentic voice, however, is charming enough to hold a reader’s attention. Gray skillfully blends a rom-com-like breeziness with incisive, nuanced commentary on societal expectations, modern disconnection, responsibility in relationships and selfhood. Hera is a fount of contemporary references, weaving in internet slang and a wide range of cultural touchstones (from “SVU” to Airbnb to Roxane Gay’s “Bad Feminist”) with a very online tone that sounds like a good friend chatting over drinks about her chaotic life.
It is in her friendships and her relationship with her father where we catch glimpses of who Hera is without Arthur, of who she might become. What both Hera and this reader expect to happen in the relationship happens, but this doesn’t come as a disappointment. Instead, the novel earns its way toward a satisfactory resolution for Hera, who is, after all, the hero of the story.
HELP WANTED: By Adelle Waldman | Norton | 288 pp. | $28.99
GREEN DOT: By Madeleine Gray | Holt | 320 pp. | $27.99
