New(ish) Books

Adelle Waldman and Glenn Loury

ADELLE WALDMAN’s Help Wanted (2024)

This book to me is a cautionary tale.

There’s a certain kind of cultural critic who is always encouraging novelists to get out of the coffee shops and join the people, and Waldman — who earned her novelistic stripes in 2013 with the excellent and very coffee shop-based The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P — actually did it, working for six months with the unloading team at a big-box store in the Catskills. As a microcosm of the American dystopia, it was a good choice — hard physical work, a soulless corporation, a diverse, representative team. Waldman clearly developed immense compassion for her colleagues — Help Wanted is full of the back stories of the warehouse workers whom her characters were based on.

So, well-researched, well-meaning, well-conceived, and the result is …. clunky, uninspired, unlived-in. Honestly, I don’t think it’s exactly Waldman’s fault. It’s more that the armature of the contemporary middle-brow novel isn’t equipped to take in the sort of raw, workforce data that Waldman supplies. And the class divide isn’t really breachable. For all their diversity — the Honduran immigrant, the guy recently out of prison, the ‘old guys’ switching off their hearing aids to work the line, the former Atlantic City maid who can’t read but knows the entirety of the warehouse from memory — all the workers are of a world. They live in their parents’ basements. They have kids but they are usually not together with their partners. Various drugs are floating around. They watch UFC whenever they can afford pay-per-view. Waldman’s capsule depictions of them, her iterations of their hard-a-knock stories, feel far more like an anthropologist’s field reports than genuine experience.

Adelle Waldman in a big-box store

It’s not totally impossible to cover this sector of the American workforce. Chloé Zhao got it in Nomadland, Annie Baker in The Flick, Joshua Ferris for a slightly different demographic in Then We Came To The End. Zhao focused in a single character finding herself in a different socioeconomic station than she might have expected. Baker sank herself into the tedium of service industry work (all the sweeping scenes that drove Off-Broadway theater audiences up the wall). Ferris tapped into the high-strung, panicky collective unconscious of white-collar workers facing layoffs. Waldman could have gone a few different routes. She could have zeroed in on a single character, as opposed to the ensemble presentation. Best, probably, would have been to have chosen a hybrid form — documenting her own time at the big-box store, dealing with her differences from the other workers, chronicling how she came to understand what she did about their lives. (Her journalism on this is impassioned and interesting.) But instead Waldman opted for a traditional story, the heart-thumping tale of how the workers in logistics attempt to elevate their own loathed Executive Manager to Store Manager by lying to corporate in their interviews — only to have that be sabotaged when corporate sees through it and goes with another candidate.

As a storyline, it’s not very interesting or consequential, and it seems mostly to be a device for Waldman to bring everybody together and connect the dots on the unwieldy source material. The sense is of Waldman feeling overwhelmed. Normally a strong sentence-to-sentence writer with a good sense of humor — “his expression turned somber like that of a television news reporter interviewing a hurricane victim,” “Val was a funny combination of childish and practical, a daydreamer, but also the kind of person who’d be good at evacuating people during a mass casualty event” — Waldman, here, has a bad case of telling-not-showing and a habit of having people’s thoughts provide exposition or advance the plot. So we get: “The money would enable her and Liz to give their son so much.” And: “There was another reason she put off applying, although she didn’t like to admit it even to herself. Deep down she was scared.”

There is the sense too of flailing, of Waldman just not being sure of what she wants to cover. There’s a diversion on the subject of ‘game’ — “It was a funny thing, game, Travis and Diego both had it, Raymond didn’t” — and one on the struggle of the ex-con character to adapt to the corporate-speak workforce — “he thought he’d be like one of the bad contestants on a reality show, the ones who said they were there to win, not make friends.” And underneath the narrative of attempting-to-subvert-Meredith-by-elevating-her is, like in an x-ray, the more interesting material of how everybody scrapes by: how people walk to work at 3 in the morning, too proud to ask for a ride or to say that their phone has been turned off; how people lend each other $20 to get them through to the next payday; how the pervading corporate-speech of management isn’t particularly cruel or even dehumanizing so much as just a giant evasion of the actual circumstances of work: “people reacted with horror to minor technical violations of the rules while not saying anything about the things that really mattered, the things that hurt,” one character muses.

The question becomes whether fiction can do justice to any of this, and the answer, probably, is yes, but not in a well-meaning book club-type book. These are very deep socioeconomic divides. Light sympathy doesn’t really bring us into Travis’ weed-dealing versus minimum-wage-job dilemma or into Ruby’s struggle to survive in the workforce without knowing how to read. For that, I don’t think it’s exactly necessary to come from the same class as one’s characters do, but it is necessary to be less constrained by politeness and to make bolder creative choices, to let imagination bridge a very difficult cultural gap.

GLENN LOURY’s Late Admissions (2024)

A thought-provoking, unusually honest memoir.

I’m trying to remember when I first became aware of Loury — I think it was this profile from 2020 that seemed sort of to be in awe of the fact that Loury hadn’t been canceled. He was guilty of a whole rap sheet of conservative wrong think and he had a pair of very public scandals behind him — an arrest for hitting his mistress in 1987 and another for possession of crack a few months later — and yet Loury kept on teaching, at Brown no less, and in public kept saying whatever he thought, no matter how far afield of the prevailing orthodoxies.

To be honest, I often find Loury a bit extreme — he seems to be a born contrarian, and he’s such a veteran of the culture wars that he gets excited only when advancing the kind of position that nobody else is willing to hold — but part of what’s refreshing about Late Admissions is that he has no interest in persuading the reader of one viewpoint or another: the book really is a ‘confession’ and Loury is invested in getting under the hood and understanding how his psyche works. In terms of the politics, Loury’s shifts can feel a bit dizzying: the radicalism of the South Side, then his ‘coming out’ as a conservative in the early ‘80s, then his repudiation of his conservative cohort in the ‘90s, then his shift back in the 2010s. But the sense is that Loury is never exactly looking for viewpoint consistency; what he is interested in is seeing what it means to be a free man and that means, often, confounding everyone else.

The main adversary Loury keeps coming up against is what he calls The Enemy Within — the part of himself that is egoic, self-destructive, and almost endlessly hedonistic. It would be possible to organize Late Admissions in reference to three books, each of which inordinately influenced Loury until he backed away from its philosophy. In the first section — The Hustler — Loury is a clever kid from the South Side, good at pool and chess, a mentee of his uncle Alfred who will go on to father 22 children by four different women, and then in a sort of sepia-toned economics fantasia, he’s “tearing it up in the seminar room” at Northwestern. “There are Players and there are suckers, I knew which one I wanted to be,” Loury writes of his worldview at this time in his life.

Loury as a hotshot young economist

That phase comes to an end in the early 1980s when Loury, with a tenured position at Harvard, abruptly chokes and starts drifting away from original work in economics. Surprisingly little introspection goes into what happened here but it seems to be a combination of academic overextension and a shift towards Loury’s new lodestar — Bonfire of the Vanities. On cue with the ‘80s, Loury gives himself over pretty much entirely to hedonism — a phase that comes to an unfortunate end in 1987 when Loury is arrested for crack possession and enters into the cycle of recovery and halfway houses.

The third phase is Born Again, as in Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries, and Loury credits faith with saving his life. But even that doesn’t endure. As Loury writes: “I am the enemy within.” No straightforward narrative would be able to entirely rescue Loury from himself.

Loury in court, 1987

If there is a single theme that binds Loury’s life, it’s doubling — the sense that there are always at least “two Glenns” operating at any given moment, and often in deep tension with one another. There’s Loury as a star student at Northwestern even as he has three children on the South Side. There’s Loury as a popular professor at Harvard even as he’s spending nights cadging crack. And there’s Loury speaking publicly and widely on family values and the breakdown of the black family, even as he almost entirely fails to acknowledge his out-of-wedlock son. “I'll be in touch, I told him. And I meant it,” Loury writes of his belated reunion with his son Alden. “And yet, years would go by before I exchanged words with him again.”

I found myself thinking of the Denzel Washington character in Flight and the Jeffrey Wright character in American Fiction — the idea that to be a successful black man in America (maybe this is true of everyone but it seems especially so of black men) requires maintenance of this constant sense of doubling: code-switching and performance and the art of constant deception. “In truth I cannot tell of all the affairs and all of the deceptions because there were simply too many to list,” Loury writes as a kind of round-up of his confession.

It is much to Loury’s credit that he doesn’t try to reconcile all the different threads of himself or to explain away his cognitive dissonance. In his account, he simply didn’t think very much about Alden until two of his other (neglected) children pushed him into a reconciliation. He didn’t pay very much attention to his much-forbearing wife Linda, and the first inkling he has of how much she suffered is when, after her death, he comes across a self-help book on forgiveness in her study and finds passage after passage thickly underlined. He has very little defense of himself either for moral hypocrisy or for an at-times unchecked narcissism. The sense, simply, is that he was under unendurable internal pressure. Late in life he encounters his uncle Alfred, he of the 22 children, who tells him, “We could only send one of us out to MIT and Harvard to that world. We sent you” — which gives a sense of the kinds of inner voices Loury would have been up against. Much of how he behaved is clearly indefensible, and Loury makes no effort to justify it. What he is interested in is something else — what it means to live as a free person, following one’s own winding path — and part of that means knowing that no one else will ever fully understand you.