Help Wanted

Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and an exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labour market` Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot At a superstore in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every day at 3.55 am. Under the red-eyed scrutiny of their self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty delivery trucks of mountains of merchandise, stock the shelves and stagger home (or to another poorly paid day job) before the customers arrive. When a chance for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement - among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her "cool kid" status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path - band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion. Help Wanted is a darkly comic workplace drama that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, and most of all it is a deeply humane portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living.