When my friends talk about the New York dating landscape that led them to become single mothers, they often cite Adele Waldman’s 2013 novel The Love Story of Nathaniel P. A non-romantic comedy, the book follows Obama-era literary figure Brooklyn and his Ivy-educated students who treat women as disposable, yet consider themselves sensitive and enlightened. It’s perfectly drawn.
The book was a huge hit, making many year-end best-of lists, and inspiring many essays about how we live now, but so much so that there are novels that define the zeitgeist in their own right. It is a relic of a bygone era when elite culture was sufficiently consistent.
But instead of capitalizing on his sudden stardom, Waldman published no new novels for more than a decade. “To my surprise, I had no other ideas,” she tells me over lunch near her home in the Hudson Valley town of Rhinebeck. She lost interest in exploring the romantic and psychological struggles of the upper middle class, especially after the shock of President Donald Trump’s election. There, in 2018, she didn’t know what to write instead, so she took a job unloading trucks at a nearby Target, and she found inspiration in the lives of people far from her environment. I was vaguely hoping to get a ration. Initially, her shift started at 6am. Then her admin suddenly changed it to 2 hours ago. She said, “What struck me was how quickly her workplace itself captured her imagination. “She has to write about this,” she said.
The result is “Help Wanted” which is moving, funny and secretly ambitious. The film follows a group of low-wage part-time employees at a large retail store like Target as they plot to oust a toxic manager and secure a promotion. our own. On the other hand, while “Nathaniel P.” delighted me with its eerie familiarity, this new novel excited me for the opposite reason. It depicts a universe that my privileged class encounters all the time but often never really understands, at least in the detailed way that Waldman describes it, and that rarely appears in fiction.
As I read this, I kept thinking how strange it is that so few contemporary novels explore the structure of the modern economy, such as the decline of brick-and-mortar retail or the corrosive effects of just-in-time scheduling.
Part of the reason, certainly, is that it’s difficult to make such stories interesting. Not many writers could write such breezy, sitcom-like neoliberal literary criticism as “Call for Help.” There’s also the fact that the publishing industry is dominated by highly educated people like those featured in Waldman’s first book, and that editors and readers alike naturally gravitate toward stories they can relate to. But there is a third reason why novels that tackle big questions of political economy are relatively rare. That’s because there was a widespread fear that writing beyond one’s experience would attract criticism, a concern that sometimes made this latest project seem risky to Waldman.
I Want Help is a polyphonic novel, with perspectives shifting between the various employees on the team. That diversity, one manager thinks to himself, “would have filled the heads of elite private schools with envy.” The characters include a middle-aged black woman with an incarcerated son, a gay ex-teen runaway with a wife and baby, and a Honduran immigrant supporting his bipolar girlfriend.
When Ms. Waldman started working on the book in 2018, her friends thought it was similar to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, in which the author went undercover to work a series of grueling, low-wage jobs. He encouraged me by imagining imaginary works. Then, in 2020, there was a backlash against American Dirt, a book written by a white woman with a Puerto Rican grandmother about Mexican immigrants fleeing cartel violence. The book was criticized for being exploitative and full of stereotypes.
Critics of American Dirt were generally careful to say that the problem was not that the author tried to transcend his own identity, but that he did it poorly. Nevertheless, in the publishing industry, writers who seek to incorporate the perspectives of underprivileged people risk devastating accusations of cultural appropriation, a sentiment that has grown stronger since that summer’s racial justice protests. Awareness was widespread.
“All of a sudden, my friends were like, ‘Are you sure this is okay?'” Waldman recalled of the turning point in 2020, saying, “The atmosphere completely changed.” But she stayed true to the story she told. “I had no choice but to take a chance,” she said.
It’s no coincidence that autofiction, or fiction rooted in autobiography, has boomed while panoramic novels of American life have declined amid growing fears about authenticity.
“You know, the gatekeeper in fiction is the MFA program,” Waldman’s friend Gary Steingart, a novelist who teaches in Columbia University’s MFA program, told me. “Most of my students are in their 20s. Perhaps some of them have had some jobs here and there, but most of them are people who have never had a traditional work life. There are a lot of them. So their first books can be autobiographical to some extent, right? And they become part of the academic publishing complex. And that’s what they write. .”
By contrast, Waldman’s new book is “a book about labor that Henry Ross would have been proud of.” “It’s about money in our society and what our society is doing for the lower middle class and lower class.”
Steingardt was interested in how it would be received, given that Waldman did not share the character’s background. “What do you think will happen here?” he said he asked her. “I don’t know. That’s really fascinating.”
So far, there hasn’t been much visible anger. After Waldman’s splashy profile in New York magazine and a photo of her posing among stacks of cracker boxes at a store near her home, several I’ve noticed some harsh comments, but they don’t seem to get much attention. Reader reviews on Goodreads can be bad, but most are positive.
The lack of debate, at least for now, may be due to several things. Social media is highly fragmented, and X (formerly Twitter) has moved to the right, making it difficult for bad actors to join social justice allies and build influence. A broader cultural shift is occurring against what is seen as the tyranny of the left. And, perhaps most importantly, Waldman writes skillfully, without condescending, about people who are radically different from himself. When she talks about her book, she tries to avoid sounding “grandiose” that it “does for six months a job that millions of people do every year.”
Perhaps the book’s early reception is a sign that the author has more freedom to explore all strata of society than many feared. In recent years, many American writers have turned inward, both for reasons of caution and fashion. But there’s a big world out there, and we need novelists to help us understand why it’s falling apart.