Should Art Be Time Capsules?

A review of Adelle Waldman's novel, 'Help Wanted'

Avenue de l'Opéra: Morning Sunshine by Camille Pissarro

Many years ago, I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when my date asked me what I thought the purpose of art was. I think I was looking at a bunch of Pissarros—the ones looking down on the Parisian boulevards—when I thought about her question. I replied with something about how art was supposed to capture what its creators saw, thought, and felt at the time they created their works, both on a personal and societal level. That way, future generations would get a chance to know what it was like to be X at the time of Y.

I’m not sure if I’m entirely onboard with the idea of art as time capsules, because it burdens the artist with the duty of a recordkeeper. But if art is truth and beauty, then a critical part of good art should be how honest it is of its time. A supremely irritating development in contemporary art is presentism, where creators indulge in wish fulfillment fantasies of what they want the past to have been (e.g. Edwardian fashion and mannerisms, but with the demographics and politics of NYU circa 2017).

I just finished reading Adelle Waldman’s new novel, Help Wanted. It’s about a group of gig workers for a big retail store in upstate New York. Their job is to unload merchandise from trucks at dawn, before the store opens. When a chance to get rid of their hated supervisor presents itself, the workers band together to concoct and carry out their grand plan.

Waldman’s first book, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., is one of my favourites (and which I’ve written about before), so I was both excited and hesitant about her second. Excited, for obvious reasons. But there’s also a wariness that comes with reading another book by an author you really like. You want to be able to say they’re one of your favourites. But what if their other works aren’t as good? You want them batting a perfect average.

Thankfully, I enjoyed Help Wanted a lot. Waldman has a gift for somehow making what looks like clunky expository backstory into something compelling. Unlike Nathaniel P., which focuses on the title character so closely that it can almost be said to be from a first-person perspective, Help Wanted spreads its attention around more. At the start, the characters are just a bunch of random names: Nicole, Diego, Val, Meredith, Big Will, Little Will… But soon enough, they become distinct personalities.

The plot also has realistically and satisfyingly proportional stakes. When I first read that the novel would involve some “just-so-crazy-it-might-work” scheme, I anticipated some outlandish machinations. The thrill of Nathaniel P. was in its realism and minute observations, so I was wary of this apparently radical departure. But while there is scheming in Help Wanted, it’s done in a perfectly believable way. More importantly, it doesn’t disrespect its characters by thinking they need to do crazy things to earn the reader’s emotional investment.

This is a critical point because while Nathaniel P. is about over-educated and pretentious twerps (which is what makes it great), Help Wanted is about the opposite. The characters in the former are the types to sneakily one-up each other at Brooklyn brownstone dinner parties about whose elite alma mater is slightly more so (all the while under the guise of self-deprecation). In contrast, many of the characters in the latter haven’t even finished high school, let alone college (let alone a brand-name college).  

Since the Trump election, we’ve all been told about how education level is the real political and cultural divide in America. The way education is presented in Nathaniel P. and Help Wanted makes this gulf clear. Nathaniel P. takes place in a world where it’s a given that one goes to a four-year college. In Help Wanted, college is more of a curious fantasy. Worse, the lack of a bachelor’s degree is an insurmountable barrier for some workers to move up in the company. Not because such a degree actually would’ve made them more skilled, but instead, because it’s proof that they are of a proper “middle-class vibe” that the company wants for its brand.

Waldman has characterized Help Wanted as her “Trump novel,” implying that it’s a novel of this era, which also implies she couldn’t/wouldn’t write Nathaniel P. in this day and age. But is she saying that from a moral or artistic standpoint? I get where she’s coming from as an artist, because if she were to have written Nathaniel P. now, then taking potshots at second-term Obama metropolitan liberal culture with the benefit of almost of a decade of hindsight wouldn’t as fun to read.

And who cares about poking fun at the Brooklyn literati when there are more serious and important things to write about? The characters of Help Wanted are poor in the real, not humblebrag, sense. In Nathaniel P., Nate is immensely proud of the fact that he lives in a tiny studio in Brooklyn with no health insurance because it means he didn’t give up on his writing dreams to do something as déclassé as going to law school. But poorness for the characters in Help Wanted isn’t about living up to the ideals of La Bohème. One character breaks down in tears because she can’t afford the $1500/month for her two daughters to enroll in gymnastics classes.

At the same time, the core conflict at the heart of Nathaniel P., which is about the various shifts in power balances between men and women in dating—whether due to age, professional accomplishment, gender ratio, etc.—are still as relevant as ever. Just last week, a piece in The Cut about an age-gap relationship set some parts of the internet on fire. It’s not as if the conundrum in this passage from Nathaniel P. has been solved:

“I wouldn’t know,” Aurit said. “For women, it’s almost always the right time.” She spoke rather edgily. Hans was just then considering going back to Germany because he still hadn’t found a job in New York.  “The thing that I think sucks,” she added after a moment, “is that whenever you—men, I mean—decide that it’s the right time, there’s always someone available for you to take up with.”

The record of Trump-induced art is not good. What saves Help Wanted is its lack of preachiness. The most obvious villain in the novel is Meredith, the cluelessly abrasive manager who is so disliked by her crew that they want her promoted, just so they won’t have to deal with her. But while I could see that she wasn’t great at her job, the workers’ loathing of her seemed disproportionate. I ended up feeling a bit bad for her because her biggest fault is that she is annoying and has no social tact. People like that are irritating, but their obliviousness make them more pitiable than loathsome.

She is also a bad cultural fit as an FIT dropout and once-aspiring singer who is trying to lead a team of people from tougher backgrounds. A lesser novel might’ve portrayed her as the beleaguered ambitious woman in hostile territory, dragged down by a bunch of small-town rubes and their misogyny (and also internalized misogyny, since Meredith’s most ardent hater is a young woman). Or maybe she’d be some caricature of a heartless corporate climber, turning the story into a fable. But in the book, everyone has their reasons for doing what they do. They might be selfish, but who else is going to look out for them?

So I’m glad that Help Wanted turned out to be a good book that successfully tackles a very different setting and demographic from those of its predecessor. But I still think about what novel we would’ve gotten if Waldman had decided to write Nathaniel P. not in the early 2010s but the early 2020s, with the same characters, story, and setting. Would we simply not be interested in that subject matter anymore because it’s in the past? Or would we like the nostalgia hit? Or would she have to set it in contemporary times, complete with the decimation of the relatively posh (and non-online) literary world of Nate, Hannah, Aurit, etc. that now seems so quaint?

I once read that the best World War I novels took many years after the end of the war to get written because people needed time and space to process what happened. I also remember how people bemoaned the suckiness of books and movies about 9/11 and the Iraq War. It was just too soon, we concluded. And aren’t we still waiting?

It’s a fundamental tension as a writer—or any artist—of wanting to enshrine moments and events as they’re happening, when they’re most vivid and raw, but also wanting to allow time to pass to let us ruminate. I suspect that this conflict has gotten much worse these days when the speed of production and distribution can be near instantaneous, so there’s more pressure to be the first rather than the best.

A friend and I were just talking about Type of Guy Theory. I think a big reason for its popularity is because we’re all frantically trying to convince everyone (and ourselves) that we’re capturing something in our culture because if we don’t, then we’ll have missed out on the definitive moments and events around us. And if so, we might as well not have existed.