 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 |
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