Help wanted A novel

There's a cutthroat game of employment roulette underway at the Town Square superstore in an economically distressed city in Upstate New York. The store's beloved general manager is leaving, and the opening is as substantial as the key block in a teetering Jenga tower. For the store's lowliest employees, those who work the grueling middle-of-the-night shift in the warehouse and loading dock, the choice of candidate is personal. Their direct supervisor, Meredith, a chirpy, insensitive go-getter, is one of two contenders. She's a corporate toady universally disliked among her staff. Still, if Meredith moves up, maybe one of them will get her spot. Waldman's (The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, 2013) crew of hardworking merchandise movers concocts a plan to ensure that Meredith is promoted, and their three-dimensional chess scheme is a master class in team building. With great compassion and humility, Waldman illustrates each employee's litany of unfortunate choices and unforced errors that has brought them to the brink of desperation, where each minute clocked and each benefit denied has life-changing impact. Waldman shines a much-needed spotlight on the inequities of corporate retail policies and practices by humanizing the plight of the workers whom consumers rely upon but rarely acknowledge.

Waldman's perceptive sophomore novel (after The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.) centers on the employees of a big-box store in Upstate New York. Nine of them are a part of the Movement team, arriving at four a.m. to unload trucks, unpack boxes, and stock the shelves before the store opens. Team manager Meredith, who's under pressure from corporate headquarters to maintain the department's budget, alienates the others by refusing requests for additional work hours or raises, contributing to their struggles to make ends meet. When the store manager announces he's transferring to another location, and that corporate will be coming to interview employees to decide which team manager will take his role, Movement member Val sees an opportunity to get rid of Meredith by pushing to promote her. Val and the other team members put the plan in action, and several of them begin fantasizing about a promotion. 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. (Mar.)

At a big-box retailer in upstate New York, a team of workers is energized by a secret plan. "'Roaches' was what other employees called the people who worked Movement, because they descended on the store in the dark of night, then scattered in the morning, when the customers arrived." Waldman's long-awaited follow-up to The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) is set in a totally different world--bye-bye, literary Brooklyn; hello, blue-collar Potterstown, a forlorn small town with a view of the Catskills, stuck in a downward spiral ever since the local IBM plant closed. What remains the same is the author's emotional intelligence, wry humor, and sensitivity to matters of money and class. Meanwhile, the details of daily operation and workplace culture at Town Square Store #1512 are evoked in fine and fascinating detail. The members of Team Movement (formerly "Logistics") are introduced in the org chart that opens the book, and that org chart is the heart of the plot. Currently the nine "roaches" are managed by a guy they call Little Will. Everybody loves Little Will, but his self-absorbed boss, Meredith, a Fashion Institute of Technology dropout, is a nightmare. Now the top dog, Big Will, whose "nonthreatening air of diversity, combined with his good looks and his youth," make him a corporate dreamboat, is getting his hoped-for transfer to his home state of Connecticut. Does that mean the hated Meredith will get his job? But if so, would Little Will move up and leave a management slot free for one of the roaches, who get no benefits whatsoever? This situation inspires a smart lesbian mom named Val to cook up a plot in which each of her sympathetically imagined Movement compadres plays a role. Even the coffeepot in the break room during a team meeting is a character: "hissing and sputtering wildly, like a small animal trying to scare off a larger predator." The workplace dramedy of the year. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.