Help Wanted: A Novel

"I have probably read Adelle Waldman’s sharp and perceptive Brooklyn comedy of manners The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. half a dozen times already, so I can’t wait for her long-awaited follow-up, Help Wanted , which will be out mid-March in the US and at the end of the month in the UK. It’s been billed as “a humane and darkly comic workplace caper” following the lives of those working an early morning shift at a big-box store in upstate New York. That description made me think of Joshua Ferris’s ad agency novel Then We Came to The End — written in the first person plural! very clever and funny—so I was delighted to see him among those endorsing the book, calling Help Wanted : “both a brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us, whose full humanity has never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered.” Miranda July will publish her second novel, All Fours , in which a forty-something artist upends her life, departs on a cross-country road-trip, and ultimately holes up in a roadside motel twenty miles from home. It’s about female desire and midlife malaise, and is the product of a highly original mind. “That phrase midlife crisis is such a punch line,” July explained to Vogue . “ You never really say it with any empathy or faith in that person’s process, you know? But when I look around at people my age, whoever isn’t having some kind of crisis at this point in their life, I wonder if they’re asleep at the wheel.”"