Outstrips its predecessor technically, emotionally, and spiritually but is perhaps not quite as much fun ... Waldman immerses us in their world ... As her characters move through their routines, Waldman maintains a kind of steady presence, attentive but not intrusive ... Washes labor in a stately, almost Steinbeckian light, emphasizing its difficulty but also its dignity. That the prose doesn’t soar is the point ... Rotates through the minds of nearly a dozen employees, who sail into focus one by one as they react to the scheme and to the desires and resentments it stirs up. They come thickly alive, by turns ingenious, petty, motivated, yearning, empathic, perversely self-thwarting, and defiantly playful.
Waldman applies her sharp sense for relational drama and dark comedy to the retail work space ... 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.
Waldman’s strength is dramatic irony, and she is attracted to characters whose flaws are fluorescently obvious to the reader (and, often enough, the character’s friends and family) but remain invisible to the characters themselves ... Agility with characters’ psychology is key to the polyvocal Help Wanted ... Nimble ... Waldman is faithful to reality: The relentless grind in which these characters find themselves won’t change ... A tragedy of circumstance.
Sociologically astute, deeply humane, and cleverly plotted ... Waldman animates her novel by profiling a sympathetic group of characters who are relegated to the four-hour shift that begins at 4 a.m ... Draws attention to moral issues raised by systemic exploitation of the working poor. The marvel is that Waldman manages to do so with an engaging, lightly satirical touch.
Waldman deftly introduces a disturbing juxtaposition: The exhausted workers grapple inwardly between befriending their colleagues or competing with them for small (but much-needed) raises. Meanwhile, corporate is secretly exploring the feasibility of automating their positions. The dramatic irony instills this comic novel’s small-time escapades with a potent and lingering feeling of injustice.
A mixed bag. As you perhaps heard in the passage above, it's graced with the psychological acuity that distinguished its predecessor. But, because Help Wanted is a group portrait, it tends to visit, rather than settle in with, its working class characters ... The overall effect is both panoramic and jumpy ... An informed depiction of outsiders: hourly wage workers, mostly without benefits, who see themselves shut out of the American Dream. If there's not as much witty banter in this novel, well, how could there be?
An earnest but dutiful plea to recognize the humanity of the people whose exploitation is the price of our convenience, and an argument for their labor as a subject worthy of serious fiction ... A good deal of what follows is so grindingly didactic. To Waldman’s credit, the nine characters who make up Team Movement are thoroughly individuated ... This breadth, however, comes at the expense of depth. We only ever glimpse characters’ interiority in flashes ... Waldman’s commitment to channeling her characters’ plainspokenness through the novel’s narration also collides awkwardly with her penchant for figurative language ... Still, for all its flaws, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Help Wanted generates even half the conversations that the more insular Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. did.
Waldman observes her characters with the hilarious, remorseless precision real people use on real people ... Waldman’s briskly roving point of view captures the constant squeeze on everyone.
[An] acidic comedy about contemporary American serfs. It’s a kind of communal novel about the people clinging to the bottom of the social cliff ... Perhaps the most impressive thing about Help Wanted is that Waldman manages, in telling her small story, to describe not just the American economic prison but the global one. So: both a novel of manners and a systems novel, a book that shows us, perhaps, how intimately linked these apparently disparate genres were all along. It’s a funny novel, as well as deeply humane and very angry.
An attempt to imagine the inner life of the warehouse in fiction ... When Waldman fills out each worker’s backstory she tends to focus on how they have run up against yet another systemic problem ... There’s nothing wrong with these details per se, and a novel that is attempting to capture a broad sweep of life surely has to acknowledge at least some of them—except that the characters who experience them never quite come to life ... The novel is written from the distance and with the awkwardness of an outsider who is conscious of her own advantages and appears wary of speaking out of turn.
Perceptive ... Though Waldman touches only briefly on the employees’ personal lives, making it difficult to keep all the characters straight, the narrative builds to a satisfying and surprising conclusion. It’s a bracing and worthwhile glimpse of the high stakes faced by low-wage workers.
