SHEILA HETI: Your new novel, Help Wanted (W. W. Norton, $29), is about the collective action of a group of workers at a big-box store. They try to get their hated boss out of their hair in a way that is counterintuitive and comic. It feels completely different from your 2013 book, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was about the inner life of a 2000s Brooklyn literary man. How did you decide to write this very different story?
ADELLE WALDMAN: I consider this novel to be a Trump novel. After he was elected, I had very little desire to write another psychological novel about the social and romantic problems of well-educated, middle-class people. But I also didn’t want to write a novel about a middle-class writer sitting in her house, wondering why people voted for Trump. I felt that rising income inequality and the decline of the American middle class were central to whatever was going on, so I decided to get a low-wage job at a big-box store. I hoped this would inspire a novel, but I wasn’t at all sure it would. Within a few weeks on the job, I became convinced there was a novel to be written, although I wasn’t yet sure that I could write it.
Did you and your coworkers talk about politics or voting or the recent election?
As we became friends, we did, and I learned that most of my coworkers were nonvoters. Over time, I came to better understand why. It wasn’t just that the logistics of voting can be difficult when you don’t have a car, and your work schedule is constantly in flux, and you are constantly having to navigate practical issues such as who will watch your kids if your hours change. It was also a sense that voting was for rich people, that it didn’t have much to do with people like them. My coworkers had seen their own working situations get much worse in the course of their lives without anyone in government seeming to care. They can hardly be blamed for feeling like neither party cared about them, even if Democrats generally favor making public assistance slightly more generous. That’s not a substitute for addressing the fact that many employers increasingly offer only part-time jobs that pay poverty-level wages. Addressing this would entail taking on large, powerful corporations, imposing requirements on them—something neither party has been willing to do.
The store is in the Catskill Mountains, and you often depict the workers as being surrounded by the glory of nature when they arrive for their shifts or leave. Can you say more about setting such a political reality against a backdrop of beauty?
When the characters step outside for their morning break at six, the sun has just risen over the mountains. It is beautiful and a contrast to the human-constructed world of the store, which has its own cadence: the whirring of the refrigerators in “Grocery”; the hum of the air-conditioning and heating systems, which keep the store at precisely the same temperature at all times—at least when the store is open to customers; the lighting, which becomes dim when the store is closed and bright during the day; the sounds made by phones and cameras and televisions on display in “Electronics.” I liked the idea of juxtaposing this world with the natural world outside the store.
I wonder if your coworkers knew you were a writer.
Not initially. I presented myself as a new mom looking for a part-time job, which was not untrue. My daughter was a year and a half when I started working there. But over time, as I became better friends with my coworkers, I knew I had to tell them. My big worry was that word would get out, and I’d get fired. That fear caused me to wait longer than I would have otherwise.
I told them on Election Day, 2018. My coworkers already thought I was a little nutty when it came to politics because I was very into the election. I told my core group of friends that I’d buy a drink for anyone who voted. By this point, they knew I was better off than many of them. My car was the giveaway. It’s a 2015 Toyota Prius, which isn’t luxe by the standards of upper-middle-class people but stood out in the store’s employee parking area. At the bar, I told them that I was a writer. They were definitely shocked. One person immediately googled me. He found The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. on Amazon and was like, “Hey, guys, she isn’t lying—she really did write a book.” They weren’t mad, though. They thought it was neat.
I often thought of Zola while reading your book—the attempt to understand a whole society through close examination of a discrete microcosm. Was it a challenge to channel your politics into a compelling narrative form?
I knew I didn’t want to write a polemic disguised as a novel, where one character voices all my opinions. I wanted to make it a real novel, one driven by character and story. The solution I eventually came up with was the book’s caperish plot in which the workers team up to try to get their bad boss promoted. Having the main characters come up with a harebrained but brilliant plan allowed me to portray them not merely as victims of exploitation but as people with agency and humor, people capable of being strategic and even diabolical. I didn’t want the novel to depict the characters as one-dimensional, as just poor people who are being exploited. This was also one of the reasons I avoided going with a straight unionization plot, incidentally. That plot felt too literal, too direct for fiction, which I think requires there be some space between the literal action depicted on the page and the action’s meaning. In the absence of such space, fiction is likely to feel flat, preachy.
At one point you wanted to call it Neoliberalism. A Novel. I love that.
I still sometimes wish I had called it that. I see the book as a systems novel, in the sense that it presents modern capitalism in microcosm. It’s my hope that there is nothing in this book that a reader could say was exaggerated or out of keeping with the pressures real corporations face and the actions they take in consequence.
One of this book’s most original features, at least in terms of contemporary fiction, is that your protagonist is a team of people, not one person.
Constructing a novel with a group protagonist was a challenge technically, but I thought there was something inherently sentimental or melodramatic or just plain awkward about trying to tell a story about capitalist exploitation that focused on an individual victim. To make the larger point, you’d have to pile one hardship after another on this one person, who is supposed to embody so much on a symbolic level. I thought such a novel would wind up reading like poverty porn. It’s also a distortion of reality. I think the real indictment of the kind of exploitation described in the book is that it chips away at a lot of people little by little.
Yes, the characters all live with this constant anxiety that feels ever on the verge of turning into a full-blown catastrophe. I find it very moving that the book is dedicated to “retail workers.” Was this the audience you had in mind while writing it?
Not exactly. I wrote the book imagining a type of reader that I know all too well from my own life: someone affluent and liberal who cares about poverty but who, deep down, thinks there is nothing much to be done because some people just lack the wherewithal to succeed in life. This person thinks that because his or her parents or grandparents rose up from poverty, low-wage workers today can do the same. I wanted these readers to see just how inaccurate this is when our society has largely accepted the morality of paying millions of workers so little that many work two or three jobs—far more than forty hours a week—and still struggle to get by.
I think the deeper problem is that, collectively, we bought into the idea that if we let corporations do whatever they can to increase their profits, we’d get more economic growth, and that would ultimately benefit everyone—the rising tide that lifts all boats, et cetera. We’ve had forty years to see how well this has worked out.
It’s a similar audience to what you were imagining for The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. I wonder if this is one of the hardest things for a writer to change: not their subject matter or formal approach, but the audience they have in mind. Do you think that all writers are writing for readers like themselves, or at least the sorts of readers they know intimately?
To some degree, at least. We know our own biases and prejudices and assumptions—and those of people like us—so well. Maybe challenging such ideas enables us to operate at a more sophisticated level as writers than trying to anticipate the reactions of people whose thinking we’re less intimately familiar with.
Does this book seem “higher” to you than Nathaniel P., or is writing this book not a repudiation of the concerns of your last one?
To be honest, I probably think that Nathaniel P. is a “higher” form of fiction. I think a good measure of the health of a society is the extent to which citizens are able to turn away from politics to focus on personal life. I felt as if I had to write Help Wanted because I couldn’t focus on anything else, but that’s a function of the state we find ourselves in collectively, where we talk a great deal about social justice and equality—we profess these ideals more loudly than ever—even as the society around us becomes ever more stratified and dystopian and discomfort-inducing. The contradictions are starting to break us, and this is something many writers and readers have sensed for a while, and certainly before Trump’s election.
I think this is probably also why psychological novels written recently tend to treat their protagonists ironically or harshly or to spend a lot of time showing how aware they are of their privilege and how guilty they feel about it. (I’m referring here to the kind of “sanctimony literature” described by the critic Becca Rothfeld, although I might be more sympathetically disposed than Rothfeld.) Most of us, writers and readers, know intuitively that something is preventing us from considering the psychological problems of even moderately privileged characters with the kind of sincere sympathy and interest that was once standard in novels, even if none of us knows quite what to do about it.
So then do you feel dissatisfied with contemporary American literature, as written by your peers?
Yes, but I think my dissatisfaction is less with contemporary fiction than the culture it reflects. For most of my adult life, I have felt out of step with contemporary thinking. So many of my ideas and assumptions about human nature derive from nineteenth-century novels, or even ones written earlier. I discovered the nineteenth-century novel in my early twenties. Before that I had been dismissive of “the canon” or any book written before the sexual revolution, really.
George Eliot was the ultimate revelation, but I found a similar richness in Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, as well as Richardson and Hardy and Wharton and James. There was insight and a depth of characterization and an emphasis on morality that was new to me, and it made most of the contemporary novels I’d read feel like thin gruel in comparison. Before I fell for the nineteenth-century novel, I associated the word “moral” with prudishness and sexual repression. But the kind of moral thinking implicit in these books is philosophical, Kantian. These writers tend to take for granted that self-respect derives from being moral, which, in their conception, requires a great deal of honesty and objectivity as well as reflection. It requires you to weigh your own moral claims against those of others.
This seems very relevant to your choice to write this new book about people with, arguably, more urgent moral claims than someone like Nathaniel P.
I think you may have just helped me answer a question I’ve been struggling with for years about how and why I came to write this book when almost everything in my life before was oriented toward more psychological and character-driven fiction. But I think that’s it—the moral claims of the characters in Help Wanted came to feel more urgent to me, intellectually and aesthetically, than the kinds of problems of people like Nate and myself.
Do you think that a contemporary realist novelist who isn’t grappling with morality—the morality of their characters or their own moral concerns as a writer—is abandoning the most important aspect of the realist tradition?
Maybe. But not because fiction has some obligation to make us better or espouse good principles. I do, however, think an attention to moral thinking can make fiction richer and fuller. For one thing, it’s an important tool of characterization. I think too many novels spend too long on characters’ tastes or preferences, which are often quite boring to read about and rely on readers’ getting references to things in the culture that are ephemeral and will quickly become dated. Far more interesting and revealing is how a character thinks about other people, how fair they are to others in their inner as well as their outer lives, how capable they are of taking in new information, how they justify their behavior—or what behaviors they fail to realize need justifying—and how willing they are to admit to themselves when they were in the wrong or have made a mistake.
It seems to me, in the present, a kind of risk to write about people whose lives are significantly different from one’s own. I wonder what you think has to change before more novelists have the curiosity or the courage to write about people in even slightly different conditions from their own?
For me, writing about people unlike myself is liberating. Writing from the perspective of a male character, Nathaniel P., for example, allowed me to say things that I’d never been able to say when I tried to write about relationships from the perspective of a character more like myself, a woman. But this was something I discovered by accident. It wasn’t a conscious or moral decision to explore the perspective of another person. Even with this new book, it’s not as if I made a deliberate, moral judgment about what kind of novel I ought to write. I’d just lost interest in writing a psychological novel about people like me.
Years went by, and I wrote no fiction. Then, I started working at the store. That got me excited about writing fiction again because it just felt more interesting to me than anything else, including whatever was going on in my own life.
As far as courage goes, I think it always feels awkward and kind of ridiculous at first, writing from the perspective of some character you’ve made up. Help Wanted was in some ways riskier than The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., although writing from the male perspective came with risks, too. If readers had felt like the character of Nathaniel P. was not credible, the book would have been rightly seen as ridiculous, a failure. With Help Wanted, the risk was about whether the book would seem by its very nature to be exploitative or even just eye-roll-inducing because, really, who am I to write about the working poor? I’m not sure if writing the book in spite of the risk took courage or just a fair amount of willful stupidity.
That’s probably the right way to feel when one is writing anything, that one is risking stupidity.
There has to be something so important to you as a writer that you ignore all the pitfalls, all the ways you could wind up falling flat on your face. Being a bit dumb is perhaps a way of escaping the limitations of a kind of boring, cautious careerism.
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books. Her latest is Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).