I liked Help Wanted, but I also noticed how it lacked the incisiveness of Nathaniel P. regarding its characters. I'd have loved for her to have given the Nate/Aurit/Jason treatment to the Help Wanted characters, but there's obviously going to be a reluctance from an upper-class writer doing that to lower-class characters. What bite and ire there was, it was focused on Meredith, whose biggest crime was thinking she was a tier above the rest of the workers, and I even felt kind of bad for her in the end.
I read some of Waldman's interviews on the book after I'd written the review, and it struck me that Waldman seemed largely to be basing Meredith on herself. She talks about herself as being kind of peppy but really clumsy and not skilled at logistics - a social outsider to this group - and then to some extent winning the group over by baking for them. I suspect that's why Meredith comes across as the strongest character.
The Waldman makes me think of Henry Green’s Paris Review interview, where he’s talking about the novel he based on working alongside his father’s factory employees (and which is very, very good).
“Yes, yes, oh yes—why, some years ago a group at our Birmingham works put in a penny each and bought a copy of a book of mine, “Living.” And as I was going round the iron foundry one day, a loam molder said to me, “I read your book, Henry.” “And did you like it?” I asked, rightly apprehensive. He replied, “I didn’t think much of it, Henry.” Too awful.”
I take his meaning not as him thinking he failed to “accurately” (whatever that means) render these working class guys, but rather that he took a very literary, experimental, high modernist approach to it that they just didn’t vibe with. There’s an uncomfortable thought that goes something like “faced with a brilliant novel about the working class and watching UFC, many actually-existing working class people would choose watching UFC. And that’s okay.”
That's interesting. I was thinking about Green while I was reading Help Wanted and thinking about why Green is so much more successful. I remember a line about Green that he was sort of lost and then really found himself by diving into a lower-class background and lower-class world - that that seemed to him to encase the whole truth of the society. I suspect that that's really the difference. That Waldman in the end is just a tourist.
I've listened to some of Loury's interviews about his book, including the one with Steve Levitt. I might yet read it myself, but I'm curious about your take on the personal disclosures he makes. A difficult calculus with grown children. My personal standard for nonfiction is that the content must serve others more than myself. Does Loury pass that standard? The voice within sounds like a narrative thread with much broader appeal. Some of it sounds a little tabloid, but I guess that is what the market demands of memoir these days.
Yes, that's a really interesting question to me. I would not have written this book. My own view is that there are some things that are so personal, that we owe to other people, and it's best to let that rest with them, even if it weakens one's narrative. There are a few sections like that with his kids. The main one though is how he talks about his long-suffering, now-deceased wife, who, obviously, doesn't get a right of reply.
But these are very personal decisions. And I have to give Loury credit for going into the deep end. He is unsparing both about himself and about everyone around him. To me, that made the book transcend some of the usual limitations of memoir, and it seemed to cross over into the place of something like Rousseau's Confessions or Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man where he's really putting his soul under the microscope and examining his moral worth in the most critical possible way.
Thanks, Sam, and your comments on Waldman leave me wondering whether earlier novelists dealing with the circumstances of work and the weight of economic and class disadvantage may have done better at the vital task of showing, not telling. The French, perhaps, even though not supposing possible identity with their subjects -- Zola; Hugo? Just musing.
Thanks Greg! Yeah, I think most novelists have 'show don't tell' really drummed into them. I was very surprised that Waldman seemed to lose her grip there. She's a skillful writer, and it seemed like something about the material was making her lose the basics of craft.
I never worked in a box store but I had many minimum wage jobs during my youth. I wasn't doing research for a book. I was just existing. One of the most insightful artworks about minumum wage jobs is SuperStore, a sit-com.
I don't think it's impossible to write about a different class insightfully when from another. But it is a challenge and most people will fail. This goes not only for the poor but for the rich as well. Orwell was very judgmental of his own position in Down and Out in Paris and London; curiously, I think he did get farther than most who come from his kind of background. Black Like Me gets a bad rep nowadays which is unfortunate, but it must have taken a very sharp and insightful individual to pull that off. Especially considering the penchant many White people have for being doofuses about race.
In an anthology of Gulag lit I'm reading right now, the introduction explains that pretty much all of it came from a certain kind of educated class of individual who was thrown into the Gulag. Virtually none (at least that the introduction writer is aware of) were written by the professional criminals or the peasants or the other poor. Much as the Gulag was an extreme situation, I don't think that dynamic is too different from the world of literature in general. For better or for worse, the middle class happens to be the demographic that cares to do this kind of thing. Waldman's subjects are probably too busy to write novels. And even if they wanted to, let's be frank: NYC would probably not be afraid to be snobby about it. (Though British, a large part of D.H. Lawrence's woes probably also had to do with his working class origins) It's simply not their world. One thinks of Zoolander where he's a rich and successful (albeit stupid) male model and his father is a coal miner: it was a hilarious extreme on the part of the film's creators. But the chasmic nature of the division is very real, and not just between these very specific professions.
Unfortunately for the lower classes, I think at this stage of technological and societal development it will be increasingly harder for people in other classes to understand each other. Even though I've had several fateful trips into the world of the upper middle class, as a lower middle class person I still don't know if I understand their ideological conditioning and how comfortably they seem to enjoy being averse to basic manifestations of reality. And while I didn't give them many instances to judge me in this fashion, you can be sure they didn't understand certain things about me. Why the things that shock them don't shock me, for instance. Why I don't care about political correctness. And so on.
Interesting that you pair these two books together in this post because to come from an environment like Loury's into one like Harvard, one has to engage in deceptions for the simple sake of appearances. Part of the reason I haven't bothered cultivating literary contacts is that much as I don't struggle relating beyond class with others, it would require these deceptions on an unending basis. And I couldn't live like that. I very much sympathize with Loury's desire for freedom. And he shouldn't apologize: in today's Woke world, an apology isn't perceived as a request for forgiveness. It's perceived as an admission of guilt, Stalin show trial style.
Thanks Felix! I agree. I think it's just one of the hardest things to do in writing. It's very, very challenging to get into another social stratum and shouldn't be attempted lightly. (Almost everybody who attempts it really fails.) Orwell pulled it off but certainly paid his dues for it. I haven't thought about Black Like Me in a long time! I liked it when I read it, but, it's true, that was many p.c. turns of the wheel ago. I do have to watch Zoolander! That's a big gap for me!
First, we have different opinions on The Guest and now Help Wanted!
It's a rare novel that takes us thoroughly inside a business and makes us (me?) care about the characters. And for me a good novel always packs more power than non-fiction
I think Help Wanted was successful in creating an authentic world of a big box store, including all layers of employees. I also think Adele Waldman does a good job of being non-judgmental.
Well, I think we're closing in on agreement on Joshua Ferris! You liked Then We Came To The End, I take it?
I remember you having a note asking why there aren't more novels set in workplaces, since that's what most people do all day and companies have all this inherent drama built into them. I've been wondering the same thing. And there are people who pull it off incredibly well. Mad Men is the best show ever. Then We Came To The End is brilliant. Writers like Richard Yates, I think, really get office life and white-collar work. But, yes, I sort of suspect that the Great American Novel, if it ever comes, will follow the rise and fall of a company. (Unless Mad Men and Succession already deserve that accolade.)
I liked Help Wanted, but I also noticed how it lacked the incisiveness of Nathaniel P. regarding its characters. I'd have loved for her to have given the Nate/Aurit/Jason treatment to the Help Wanted characters, but there's obviously going to be a reluctance from an upper-class writer doing that to lower-class characters. What bite and ire there was, it was focused on Meredith, whose biggest crime was thinking she was a tier above the rest of the workers, and I even felt kind of bad for her in the end.
I read some of Waldman's interviews on the book after I'd written the review, and it struck me that Waldman seemed largely to be basing Meredith on herself. She talks about herself as being kind of peppy but really clumsy and not skilled at logistics - a social outsider to this group - and then to some extent winning the group over by baking for them. I suspect that's why Meredith comes across as the strongest character.
The Waldman makes me think of Henry Green’s Paris Review interview, where he’s talking about the novel he based on working alongside his father’s factory employees (and which is very, very good).
“Yes, yes, oh yes—why, some years ago a group at our Birmingham works put in a penny each and bought a copy of a book of mine, “Living.” And as I was going round the iron foundry one day, a loam molder said to me, “I read your book, Henry.” “And did you like it?” I asked, rightly apprehensive. He replied, “I didn’t think much of it, Henry.” Too awful.”
I take his meaning not as him thinking he failed to “accurately” (whatever that means) render these working class guys, but rather that he took a very literary, experimental, high modernist approach to it that they just didn’t vibe with. There’s an uncomfortable thought that goes something like “faced with a brilliant novel about the working class and watching UFC, many actually-existing working class people would choose watching UFC. And that’s okay.”
That's interesting. I was thinking about Green while I was reading Help Wanted and thinking about why Green is so much more successful. I remember a line about Green that he was sort of lost and then really found himself by diving into a lower-class background and lower-class world - that that seemed to him to encase the whole truth of the society. I suspect that that's really the difference. That Waldman in the end is just a tourist.
I've listened to some of Loury's interviews about his book, including the one with Steve Levitt. I might yet read it myself, but I'm curious about your take on the personal disclosures he makes. A difficult calculus with grown children. My personal standard for nonfiction is that the content must serve others more than myself. Does Loury pass that standard? The voice within sounds like a narrative thread with much broader appeal. Some of it sounds a little tabloid, but I guess that is what the market demands of memoir these days.
Yes, that's a really interesting question to me. I would not have written this book. My own view is that there are some things that are so personal, that we owe to other people, and it's best to let that rest with them, even if it weakens one's narrative. There are a few sections like that with his kids. The main one though is how he talks about his long-suffering, now-deceased wife, who, obviously, doesn't get a right of reply.
But these are very personal decisions. And I have to give Loury credit for going into the deep end. He is unsparing both about himself and about everyone around him. To me, that made the book transcend some of the usual limitations of memoir, and it seemed to cross over into the place of something like Rousseau's Confessions or Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man where he's really putting his soul under the microscope and examining his moral worth in the most critical possible way.
Thanks, Sam, and your comments on Waldman leave me wondering whether earlier novelists dealing with the circumstances of work and the weight of economic and class disadvantage may have done better at the vital task of showing, not telling. The French, perhaps, even though not supposing possible identity with their subjects -- Zola; Hugo? Just musing.
Thanks Greg! Yeah, I think most novelists have 'show don't tell' really drummed into them. I was very surprised that Waldman seemed to lose her grip there. She's a skillful writer, and it seemed like something about the material was making her lose the basics of craft.
I never worked in a box store but I had many minimum wage jobs during my youth. I wasn't doing research for a book. I was just existing. One of the most insightful artworks about minumum wage jobs is SuperStore, a sit-com.
https://youtu.be/NgZXnTZbF3g?si=42i3kk89CcQkbeCR
And I'm positive that that makes for much more lived-in writing than this sort of fly-by investigation
I've watched a few episodes of Superstore since I commented. A great show.
I don't think it's impossible to write about a different class insightfully when from another. But it is a challenge and most people will fail. This goes not only for the poor but for the rich as well. Orwell was very judgmental of his own position in Down and Out in Paris and London; curiously, I think he did get farther than most who come from his kind of background. Black Like Me gets a bad rep nowadays which is unfortunate, but it must have taken a very sharp and insightful individual to pull that off. Especially considering the penchant many White people have for being doofuses about race.
In an anthology of Gulag lit I'm reading right now, the introduction explains that pretty much all of it came from a certain kind of educated class of individual who was thrown into the Gulag. Virtually none (at least that the introduction writer is aware of) were written by the professional criminals or the peasants or the other poor. Much as the Gulag was an extreme situation, I don't think that dynamic is too different from the world of literature in general. For better or for worse, the middle class happens to be the demographic that cares to do this kind of thing. Waldman's subjects are probably too busy to write novels. And even if they wanted to, let's be frank: NYC would probably not be afraid to be snobby about it. (Though British, a large part of D.H. Lawrence's woes probably also had to do with his working class origins) It's simply not their world. One thinks of Zoolander where he's a rich and successful (albeit stupid) male model and his father is a coal miner: it was a hilarious extreme on the part of the film's creators. But the chasmic nature of the division is very real, and not just between these very specific professions.
Unfortunately for the lower classes, I think at this stage of technological and societal development it will be increasingly harder for people in other classes to understand each other. Even though I've had several fateful trips into the world of the upper middle class, as a lower middle class person I still don't know if I understand their ideological conditioning and how comfortably they seem to enjoy being averse to basic manifestations of reality. And while I didn't give them many instances to judge me in this fashion, you can be sure they didn't understand certain things about me. Why the things that shock them don't shock me, for instance. Why I don't care about political correctness. And so on.
Interesting that you pair these two books together in this post because to come from an environment like Loury's into one like Harvard, one has to engage in deceptions for the simple sake of appearances. Part of the reason I haven't bothered cultivating literary contacts is that much as I don't struggle relating beyond class with others, it would require these deceptions on an unending basis. And I couldn't live like that. I very much sympathize with Loury's desire for freedom. And he shouldn't apologize: in today's Woke world, an apology isn't perceived as a request for forgiveness. It's perceived as an admission of guilt, Stalin show trial style.
Thanks Felix! I agree. I think it's just one of the hardest things to do in writing. It's very, very challenging to get into another social stratum and shouldn't be attempted lightly. (Almost everybody who attempts it really fails.) Orwell pulled it off but certainly paid his dues for it. I haven't thought about Black Like Me in a long time! I liked it when I read it, but, it's true, that was many p.c. turns of the wheel ago. I do have to watch Zoolander! That's a big gap for me!
Sam,
First, we have different opinions on The Guest and now Help Wanted!
It's a rare novel that takes us thoroughly inside a business and makes us (me?) care about the characters. And for me a good novel always packs more power than non-fiction
I think Help Wanted was successful in creating an authentic world of a big box store, including all layers of employees. I also think Adele Waldman does a good job of being non-judgmental.
We'll both keep on reading and eventually agree.
Well, I think we're closing in on agreement on Joshua Ferris! You liked Then We Came To The End, I take it?
I remember you having a note asking why there aren't more novels set in workplaces, since that's what most people do all day and companies have all this inherent drama built into them. I've been wondering the same thing. And there are people who pull it off incredibly well. Mad Men is the best show ever. Then We Came To The End is brilliant. Writers like Richard Yates, I think, really get office life and white-collar work. But, yes, I sort of suspect that the Great American Novel, if it ever comes, will follow the rise and fall of a company. (Unless Mad Men and Succession already deserve that accolade.)
Agreed on Mad Men. I'm ready fro a rewatch. And I'd forgotten that Revolutionary Road does a great job with the office setting.