 A funny and poignant look at the lives of American retail workers.
Town Square is a big box store in upstate New York, one that sells everything from organic food to electronics. Team Movement is a group of employees who unpack and put out on display all of the store’s goods. It’s an arduous job, involving lots of lifting and running around the store. The hours are not good and conditions worse. Work is precarious, with employees always after more hours, while finding their entitlements and perks being eroded over time. There is lots of bitching and sniping among the workers as they strive, uselessly, to try and improve their lot. At one stage in the novel, as the workers plot, they even laugh uproariously at the hopeless idea of starting a union. An opportunity to improve workplace conditions happens when the hated middle manager, Meredith, is slated for promotion. The members of Team Movement plot to get her advanced. The idea is that if Meredith is promoted to Store Manager, they can get her of their backs. Spearheading this effort is Val, a plucky go-getter. She signs everyone up to the plan to give excellent feedback about Meredith’s performance when corporate’s head honchos visit the store to conduct employee interviews, and also decide to sabotage her rival Anita’s chances for the position. (Her display work is ruthlessly messed up before the corporate visit.). There is one dissenter, the surly Nicole, who thinks Meredith should die in a ditch. But eventually she too is convinced to come on board. Val’s strategy is on course to succeed, when things suddenly go pear shaped. Milo, an efficient worker with anger management issues, decides to tell corporate that Meredith is a drug pusher (she offers caffeine tablets during the night shifts). The corporate interviewers become alarmed and must get to the bottom of things. Further complications are thrown into the mix when a store manager also has some interesting revelations about Meredith. Help Wanted is Adelle Waldman’s second novel. Her first, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., appeared in 2013. Waldman did a stint as a night worker at a big box store and turned her experiences into a novel. What she offers here is a witty and perceptive satire on modern corporate America, taking a scalpel to crushing contemporary workplace culture. There are plenty of laugh out loud moments and clever zingers. While Help Wanted most certainly presents a theatre of the ridiculous, there is a deeply humane undercurrent. All of Team Movement’s workers are given fully fleshed out back stories, dealing with lost love, rejection, financial struggles, the difficulties of raising children while working multiple jobs, and the constant drumbeat of money troubles. As someone who has worked in the corporate world, I can attest to the book’s psychological accuracy: the manipulation, spin and stress. There is an aura of terrible impotence as the workers try to improve their lot, the irony being that they decide to try and get someone they hate promoted, while laughing off any idea of starting a union. Help Wanted explains the desperate lives of America’s poorly paid workers, showing how the middle class has been hollowed out. Given the current grievances of America’s poor and overworked, it probably goes someway to explaining Trumpism. A startling portrait of corporate America and how it crushes people. Help Wanted, by Adelle Waldman. Published by Serpent's Tail. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Twilight Sleep is a 1927 novel by American writer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Edith Wharton. It is here republished in a lovely new jacket by Smith & Taylor Classics.
Pauline Manford is married to Dexter Manford, and they have a daughter, Nona. Pauline also has a son, Jim, by a previous husband, Arthur Wyant. Jim is married to the flighty flapper girl, Lita, who is growing restless with her marriage. Much concern in the family circles around keeping this marriage together. At the head of these efforts is the indomitable Pauline, who has endless reserves of energy and optimism. However, despite Pauline’s outward exuberance, her wellbeing is heavily reliant on a mixture of wellness treatments and popular self-help strategies from an army of personal gurus. While much of the family’s focus is on Jim and Lita’s marriage, the eminently sensible daughter Nona is having private troubles of her own. She is in love with Stanley Heuston, an unhappily married man whose wife won’t allow a divorce. Living in the midst of so much material comfort, a deep irony is at play as Nona finds her life spiritually empty. While mostly satirical in tone, the story builds up to a violent climax that leaves Wharton’s cast of characters stumbling around for answers, but unable to find any. Reading through this 100 year old novel, it’s striking how closely it echoes many of today’s fad and obsessions. The action focuses on affluent middle-class life, and how the very well off spend (or waste) their time. Wharton’s razor sharp observations of the vanities and inanities of the rich almost reads as a companion piece to American philosopher Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), a book that dissected middle class tastes, manners and self delusions. The novel’s main theme, it could be argued, is how the idle rich spend their time pursuing useless busy work. Many times in the text Wharton has her characters lament how empty days spent trying to relax only results in more stress. “Certainly, no amount of "mental deep-breathing," and all the other exercises in serenity, could combat the nervous apprehension produced by this breathless New York life. Today she really felt it to be too much for her: she leaned back and closed her lids with a sigh. But she was jerked back to consciousness by the traffic-control signal, which had immobilized the motor just when every moment was so precious. The result of every one's being in such a hurry to get everywhere was that nobody could get anywhere. She looked across the triple row of motors in line with hers, and saw in each (as if in a vista of mirrors) an expensively dressed woman like herself, leaning forward in the same attitude of repressed impatience, the same nervous frown of hurry on her brow." "Oh, if only she could remember to relax!” A witty and rather savage portrait of American wealth in the 1920s. Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton. Published by Smith and Taylor Classics. $29.99 Book review by Chris Saliba  Gay Marris gives murder the comedy-horror treatment in this entertaining debut.
It’s 1960s, Swinging London. Atbara Avenue is a cosy yet nosy street, one where everyone knows everyone else’s business, built towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. At one end there is a corner shop and at the other a church, St Francis in the Fields. The street has become somewhat gaudy in its aspect, as contemporary decorative fashions, with all their ephemeral novelties, have taken prominence. Despite its surface calm, Atbara Avenue is soon shocked by the apparent suicide death of Pauline Dollimore, unhappy daughter of faded songbird Muriel Dollimore, with whom she lived. As the story progresses, we are introduced to more unusual characters - a set of rival twins, a local beauty who goes missing, a weird girl who collects animals - many of whom meet untimely deaths. Weaving in and out of this bizarre cast is the stiff-upper-lip vicar’s wife Deidre O’Reilly, and her eternally bemused husband, Desmond. They remain cheerful and untouched by the subterranean oozings and slitherings of Atbara Avenue, carrying on their trivial, self-satisfied life while the worst of human depravity unfolds around them. A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder is English author Gay Marris’s debut novel. (Interestingly Marris is a retired scientist with an interest in insect ecology and parasites.) The book doesn’t work so much as a novel, rather it’s more a collection of bizarre tales, with well drawn characters and compelling plot lines. The only continuing thread is the indomitable vicar and his wife, steady in their unflappable foolishness. Gay Marris’s crime debut is a total original, almost a Gothic comedy-horror. The best analogy is perhaps the novels of American Shirley Jackson, noted for their macabre yet comic tone. A delicious treat for those with a wicked sense of humour. A Curtain Twitcher's Book of Murder, by Gay Marris. Published by Bedford Square Fiction. $32.99 Review by Chris Saliba  When three school boys drown in a freak accident, a local community goes looking for a scapegoat.
Grace Disher is employed at an all boys Catholic School. As Outdoor Education teacher she is in charge of a school excursion to Juliet Beach, a notoriously volatile coastal stretch in Victoria. Three boys from the group - Jake, Harry and Roberto - take it upon themselves to strip off and run into the sea, for what reason no one knows. Before Grace can stop the boys, they are gone, swept out to sea. The remaining boys are instructed to keep quiet, until further notice, but immediately start sending messages to the outside world. Before Grace can properly grasp what has happened, the media have been alerted, and worse, social media has prematurely judged events. Grieving parents and an internet spiralling out of control turn the blame directly on Grace, who soon finds her own safety is at risk. Three Boys Gone is the debut thriller from author Mark Smith. The novel has a compellingly realistic tone and addresses key issues such as workplace misogyny, trial by social media and outdated Catholic School social attitudes. The story quickly builds to an unexpected shock-horror climax, as Grace must evade someone intent on doing her harm. A genuine page-turner confronting urgent contemporary themes. Three Boys Gone, by Mark Smith. Published by Macmillan Australia. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Andrea Goldsmith confronts life’s big questions.
Three lives are at the crossroads. Adrian is an academic who specialises in the study of death. His partner of ten years, Irene, has left him and he quietly struggles to reorient his life. Kezi, neighbour and friend to Adrian, is a young artist, rejected by her fundamentalist Christian family because of her sexuality. And finally there is Laura, an accomplished town planner, who has married a self-assured yet vacuous man. Her husband Tony’s intellectual brilliance is based more in his insecurities than natural perspicacity. She genuinely loves him, but constantly finds herself walking on eggshells around his oversized ego. One day a chance meeting brings Laura and Adrian together, and they realise they have academic interests in common. As an intimacy grows between the two - they meet for regular lunches on a bench in Melbourne’s Treasury Gardens - Laura is drawn more into Adrian’s world, and is eventually introduced to his friend, Kezi. A close knit friendship group grows between the three and is solidified when a tragedy strikes. Andrea Goldsmith’s Melbourne-centric novel, The Buried Life, is an immersive, slow moving study of love, friendship, music and poetry. The novel concentrates on middle-class, academic lives, people living and working in Melbourne’s inner city, yet every character is easily recognisable. An entirely satisfying and sympathetic portrait of everyday lives, one that plumbs the depths of the soul. The Buried Life, by Andrea Goldsmith. Published by Transit Lounge. $34.99 Book review by Chris Saliba  The second novel in Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries series.
It’s 1919, Ukraine. There is much upheaval in the capital city, Kyiv, as the political fallout from World War I is felt. Most notably, the Russian secret police, or Cheka, wields its arbitrary yet terrifying power. Employed as a policeman by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Militia, Samson Kolechko has been assigned a peculiar case. He must investigate the slaughter of a pig and the selling of its parts as meat. Apparently, and no one seems to know this, the selling of meat is now deemed illegal. Higher up bureaucrats call it “speculating”, a nefarious capitalist practice. Samson’s investigations lead him into all sorts of strange encounters in Kyiv’s back alleys and underground markets. While these Byzantine inquiries are going on, Samson, who is a young man, is trying to get on with his personal life. He intends to marry his fiancee, Nadezhda, who has troubles of her own working as a census taker. Andrey Kurkov is considered one of Ukraine’s finest contemporary writers, and it’s not difficult to see why, going by this second installment of the author’s “Kyiv Mysteries” series. The novel is permeated with a wonderfully earthy tone, full of detailed descriptions of Ukrainian life in 1919. There are many memorable scenes: Red Army soldiers that mysteriously vanish at a sauna, an eccentric atheistic wedding and buffoonish interrogation lessons, where students are told how to blow smoke in a subject's face. The Stolen Heart has a rich vein of humour that runs through it, as we follow the naive Samson’s bungling in his strenuous attempts to keep his superiors happy. But beneath this comic surface there lies the grinding, tectonic plates of state, a bloodthirsty and mindless government bureaucracy inexorably taking its victims. The final scenes of the novel are shocking, where Samson is forced to make a terrible decision. It’s hard to imagine you’ll read a better novel this year. A richly absorbing tale of the absurdity and terror that is totalitarian government. The Stolen Heart, by Andrey Kurkov. Published by MacLehose Press. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe provides an instructive short history.
The decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and often highly contested. Enter Israeli historian Ilan Pappe with this accessible short history. Zionism, we learn, began as a European Christian movement in the 16th Century. It was believed the return of the Jewish people to Zion would fulfil God’s promise in the Old Testament. Hence many religious groups were emotionally and spiritually invested in Palestine. Modern Zionism took off in earnest in the 19th Century, and once the Ottoman Empire collapsed during the First World War and Britain controlled Palestine, they promised the establishment of a Jewish homeland there. The Palestinians, also, had been promised their own state, just as had happened with neighbouring territories such as Jordan and Egypt. The main problem was how Britain juggled these two promises. As Jews bought more and more land, with income from around the world, they were allowed to displace Palestinians from their villages and farms. Fast forward to the wars of 1948 and 1967, and all of Historical Palestine came under Israeli rule. Two refugee camps were set up - the Gaza Strip and West Bank, still in existence today. The conflict as Ilan Pappe portrays it is basically one of power imbalance. Britain and the US sided with Israel, providing arms and money. Palestinians were disenfranchised and removed from their lands (Pappe constantly refers to this process as ethnic cleansing.) The solution (obviously what should have happened from the start) is to give full citizenship to all Palestinians. That is, a one state solution. With such entrenched division, this seems impossible. But so does the continuation of the current situation, with Palestinians as a disenfranchised, stateless people. Into this mix, Pappe adds that Israel is not stable itself, and at the time of the Hamas attacks the country was on the verge of civil war, with deep seated divisions between secular and religious Jews. An excellent primer that clarifies much, but leaves a despairing portrait. A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, by Ilan Pappe. Published by Oneworld. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A middle-aged woman experiences her daughter’s wedding as an emotional roller coaster
Sixty-something Gail Baines has a lot going on in her life. Instead of being in line for a promotion as school principal, she’s been sidelined by a complete stranger. In fact, she’s been asked to quit her position as deputy altogether. Rubbing salt into the wound, her boss has told her she has poor people skills. This discombobulating news comes the day before her daughter Debbie’s wedding. Her ex-husband, Max, has arrived, armed with a stray cat that needs looking after. Then there is news - gossip, really - that makes Gail wonder if Debbie’s betrothed, Kenneth, is such a good match after all. With so much going on over three days - dealing with in laws, an ex-boyfriend that turns up at the wedding and a pushy cat that is making itself at home - it’s no wonder that life seems to have been turned upside down. Three Days in June makes for an easy to read social comedy about middle-class life. Anne Tyler’s peerless gift for realistic dialogue and situations is everywhere evident. Indeed, often it feels like you’ve been invited to listen in and comment on intimate family discussions. The narrator, Gail, is often unconsciously funny, knocking back social invitations because she’s simply not interested and sometimes finding that the world’s image of her doesn’t match her own. But she plods on, like we all do, and finds life’s not as bad as all that, even surprisingly good at times. An enjoyable, light read from the master of the craft. Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler. Published by Chatto & Windus. $32.99 Review by Chris Saliba  An eighty year old with a dark, wartime past goes on a quirky road trip with her son.
In this work of autofiction, narrator Christian Kracht, famous for his novel Faserland as well as other works, reunites with his octogenarian mother on a road trip of sorts through the Swiss Alps. Middle-aged Christian’s mother - we don’t learn her name - has invested heavily in the arms industry and reaped a whirlwind. Taking her medication with good swigs of vodka, and sporting a colostomy bag that needs frequent changing, she has withdrawn tens of thousands from her bank account and stuffed the cash in cheap plastic bags, determined to indiscriminately give it away. As the two take taxi rides around the Swiss Alps, they go over their past together, trudging through a murky and shameful family history. Christian’s grandfather - his mother’s father - was a member of the Nazi’s SS. Eurotrash is a dark, rancid comedy about wealth and privilege. Kracht provides a razor sharp skewering of decadent, self-regarding elites, whose money has come from a long line of misery. There is a sense of ennui and terribly bad taste that goes hand in hand with this ruling class, who don’t do introspection. Rather they live gaudy lives of depressing excess. Worse still, when their pasts are excavated the skeletons of fascism and dirty capitalism are found. Christian Kracht is a Swiss writer. Eurotrash was first published in 2021 and now gets an English translation by Daniel Bowles. A novel that is short and acerbic, with a powerful underlying morality. Eurotrash, by Christian Kracht. Translated by Daniel Bowles. Published by Serpent's Tail. $26.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Three office workers find themselves caught in some weird office politics.
Ashikawa is a sweet natured young woman who likes to bake treats for her co-workers, sickly sweet cakes and tarts with intricate icing work and dainty decorations. Her arrival at her office job with these elaborate confections are almost mini-events. Co-workers gather around and await specially cut slices and must then ooh and ahh at every mouthful. Nitani is in a half-hearted relationship with Ashikawa. He likes to eat instant noodles, almost as a staple. He hates to fuss with food and prefers the quickest route to a full stomach. Despite his relationship status with Ashikawa, he finds her annoying. Worse still, he secretly doesn’t like her sweet treats she bakes for the office. Oshio, another workmate, often hangs out with Nitani for beers and is the complete opposite of Ashikawa. In fact, she can’t stand Ashikawa. The truth is, Ashikawa is high maintenance, and she is coddled by her co-workers, receiving special treatment. She regularly goes home early, or has sick days, due to recurring headaches or simple bouts of fatigue. Co-workers hover around her, asking that she’s alright, even suggesting she go home. The irony is, Ashikawa is portrayed as the weak one, yet she somehow, innocently enough, manages to manipulate those around her. Junko Takase is an award winning Japanese novelist. May You Have Delicious Meals, as the title suggests, is a quirky, out-of-the box look at office work and the interpersonal politics it spurs. This is a not too happy crew of workers, grudgingly attending ‘fun’ office lunches and other get-togethers, but not unhappy enough to seek work elsewhere or make serious career changes. They are trapped in comfortable but uninspiring, unambitious lives. This may sound bland enough, but Takase lifts the subject matter with brilliant comic touches and a careful anatomising of modern workplace culture and manners. A strange, oddball little novel for readers of Convenience Store Woman and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. May You Have Delicious Meals, by Junko Takase. Translated by Morgan Giles. Published by Hutchinson Heinemann. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba |
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