According to a recent article in the New York Times, five years after the publication of her critically praised and popular 2013 novel, THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P., Adelle Waldman took a job unloading trucks at a Target near her home in Rhinebeck, New York, hoping to find inspiration for her next work of fiction. Readers of HELP WANTED, her reflective, wry second novel, will be happy she made this choice and succeeded handsomely in her search.

If “The Office” had been centered on the warehouse crew at Dunder Mifflin, but without playing its workers entirely for laughs, it might have looked something like Waldman’s book. Set sometime during the Trump presidency in the fictional upstate New York town of Potterstown, a place that’s “as much museum as city” since the departure of an IBM facility and the Great Recession, it focuses on the 13 members of “Team Movement” at Store #1512 of the big-box chain known as Town Square.

"There are plenty of pundits commenting on the challenges facing working-class Americans today, but sometimes fiction’s tools are more useful in exposing the truth. That’s the beauty of what Adelle Waldman has accomplished here."

The job of these part-time employees involves working a shift between 4am and 8am, unloading a truckload of merchandise in less than one hour and stocking the shelves with these items. Because their positions don’t produce sufficient income to provide for them and their families, most have second jobs, relying on food stamps to help feed themselves and often foregoing health insurance. Like all physical retailers, their employer is locked in what feels like a desperate losing battle against an entity that Waldman refers to only as the “online retailer,” as if it “possessed occult powers by which the utterance of its name would strengthen it.”

The conflict at the center of HELP WANTED is launched by the impending promotion of Big Will, the store’s manager. One of the two candidates to replace him is Meredith, the decidedly unpopular leader of Team Movement. Despite her loathing for her boss, a veteran team member named Val hatches a scheme to boost Meredith’s chances. If she moves up, it will set in motion a chain of likely internal promotions that may include the plan’s ringleader herself.

With gentle humor, Waldman follows the execution of Val’s at times ham-handed plan alongside Meredith’s awkward last-minute effort to ingratiate herself with her underlings as the date for a decision approaches. One of her principal talents lies in efficiently creating appealing characters who are much more than predictable workplace archetypes, even as their diversity “would have made the headmaster of a private school bug-eyed with envy.” In addition to sharing their varied histories, she does this by providing small but meaningful insights into their behavior that distinguish one from the other.

Among them are the pride that one employee takes in her neat one-bedroom apartment and her reluctance to invite her co-workers to visit for fear that they’ll disturb its order; the pleasure of another employee in initiating the unloading process in a way that tells a sort of story in the order he takes the boxes out of the truck, in one case “dramatizing the human life cycle”; and the distant dream of a third worker of earning a college football scholarship, even as he has accumulated a record of minor crimes and lacks the GED he’ll need to advance at the store.

Realistic or not, every one of Team Movement’s workers, who might slip easily into a Richard Russo novel, harbors a vision of a better life. Some have struggled with drugs or alcohol, others have been unable to find happiness in stable romantic relationships. As Waldman portrays it, each faces obstacles --- whether personal or societal --- that for most of them make those goals seem unattainable, and she subtly evokes our ability to identify with them as human beings in the process.

Waldman maintains the suspense surrounding whether or not Meredith will secure her promotion until near the end of the novel. But the outcome of that contest, and the success or failure of Val’s scheme, is almost beside the point. In truth, the book is much more about illuminating the lives of the people who unload the trucks and stock the shelves at Target or Costco --- and, by extension, those of the millions of invisible others whose toil is essential to the functioning of the American economy.

The Irish novelist Colum McCann once wrote, “I happen to think that an ounce of empathy is worth a boatload of judgment.” It’s impossible to come away from this novel without at least a bit more empathy for its characters and their real-life counterparts. There are plenty of pundits commenting on the challenges facing working-class Americans today, but sometimes fiction’s tools are more useful in exposing the truth. That’s the beauty of what Adelle Waldman has accomplished here.