In October 2013 the nameless narrator of Saul Leslie’s novel A Working Title I Want to Change starts a new job at a branch of Tesco, the largest supermarket in the UK. The position is a means to an end. A native of rural East Anglia, he has moved to London to study for a master’s in English literature. He is the first in his family to go to university, and he doesn’t have financial backing; the hours at Tesco are meant to support him while he studies.
But it isn’t easy to live in London on Tesco wages. He can’t find an affordable place to rent, and so he must move from room to room, staying with friends or acquaintances on the sofa, on the floor, or, once, in an empty bathtub. His bosses pressure him to take shifts when he has events at the university and lecture him on loyalty to “the Tesco family.” Surveillance technologies are introduced to monitor, rank, and control employees as they work, and he sees coworkers fired on flimsy pretexts. One day the door of a large trolley swings open into his face, bruising his cheek and causing him to spill the food he’d been moving. He is disciplined by his boss for wasting produce.
Leslie is a Liverpool-based academic who studies disability and literature, and A Working Title I Want to Change is his first novel. The narrator is living at the harsh extreme of the austerity program, the series of public funding cuts imposed by Conservative-led governments in the 2010s. The narrator’s voice is—perhaps unexpectedly—pretty easygoing. One early chapter opens with some reflections on his sleeping situation: “Nobody should be this familiar with sofas. You might not know it, and fair play if you don’t, but this standard piece of household furniture has its own distinct qualities.”
That laddish “fair play” is a phrase that’s often heard spoken in the UK but that rarely appears in British literary fiction. The story itself has a knockabout feel as it ponders the sofa’s qualities (“the strained imprint of a hundred arses, or countless pairs of cheesy feet”) or the nature of jazz (a “truly democratic sound”) while the narrator and his mates take a drunken piss in an alleyway, then get into a fight. The narrator enjoys physical comedy, puns, and poop jokes. He goes for beers, he tries to get laid, he offers chatty analyses of social and cultural phenomena. Leslie creates the effect of an interesting conversation in the pub with someone who is thoughtful, politically alert, and ready with a story about the time his housemate walked in on him wanking.
At times his monologue can be deft and funny (a manager’s windowless back office “smells of coffee and farts, the latter fresh”), but he tends to prefer an extended conceit. The woman who runs the narrator’s induction session “makes me think of old lettuce—maybe it’s how tightly her hair has been pulled back against her scalp, showing up the poor dye’s pale veins.” Or it could be “her crinkly, scrunched up face, as when an iceberg gets cross-sectioned. Or it’s her chilly voice.” Her skin is “that whitish yellow of rotting leaves.” When she smiles, “her grin [is] no kind of little gem.” Later, she “grins another gemless grin.”
There are many ways to compare this woman to lettuce, including the manner in which she “marches or rolls” along a carpet between desks. Leslie maintains this looseness throughout the novel. The narrator gets stoned, then recounts the various filming locations for the television series Peaky Blinders. He reads museum plaques about John Keats, watches a friend’s baby niece for a while (the diaper leaks), and offers a précis of Boris Johnson’s pre–prime ministerial newspaper columns and television appearances. One detour simply describes the actions of Miley Cyrus in the music video for “Wrecking Ball.”
For readers who are unfamiliar with precisely how British supermarkets map onto social class, he provides a handy “schema,” running from the royal family’s favored department store, Fortnum and Mason (“Upper”), to the neighborhood food bank (“Lowest”), via the frozen food emporium Iceland (“Lower-lower”) and the elite Waitrose (“Middle-upper”)…and so on. Tesco is the biggest chain by some distance—its market share is almost 30 percent—and Leslie’s narrator places it bang at the center: Middle-middle.
Later in the novel he proposes that Tesco holds such a vast proportion of the market because it has found ways to reach across several distinct classes, with targeted ranges (Tesco Finest, Tesco Value) to draw the rich and the poor. This cross-class appeal makes Tesco an interesting setting for a social novel. Montgomery, “maybe seventy, very posh and well-off,” appears for his daily bottle of champagne. A stressed dad, accompanied by a weeping toddler, shells out for a kids’ magazine. “Shane,” the dad says to his son. “Stop wantin’ for everyfink. I’m not made of bladdy maney.”
The narrator is initially placed on the deli counter because, his colleagues tell him, he is not yet ready for the vast backroom space known only as “the warehouse.” The warehouse is where food is sent when it reaches the end of its shelf life. “It’s like nothing else,” they say. “It fucks with ye head in there.”
When at last he crosses its threshold, he enters a waste zone of “stench” and “ruinous noises”; there is “grief, disease,” and “hideous destruction,” streaked with bin juice and rotting mayonnaise. The “full-fat darkness” of this “ominous cavern” recalls a mine shaft (“A procession of warehouse workers passes us, each hunched figure under a huge sack”)—I thought of the colliery in Zola’s Germinal and the silver-mining settlements in Conrad’s Nostromo. The warehouse is the heart of darkness of Leslie’s novel: a dreamlike place of horror that is generally unseen, not despite but because of its centrality to society’s everyday evils.
Leslie shows how English society manifests in the Tesco workforce. When the company is featured negatively in the national press, “inevitably, the workday is tense and difficult.” Executives are “in mourning” for their good reputation, and below them the Team Leaders are “stressing,” which means that Counter Managers feel “on edge” and those at the bottom, on the shop floor, are subjected to “a repeated bollocking.” The passage subverts right-wing arguments in support of trickle-down economics using a concept that feels closer to reality: “trickle-down anxiety.”
The story also takes us beyond the shop floor, to the stately home of Florence Grand, an aristocratic fellow student of the narrator, and to the streets and public gardens frequented by a homeless man the narrator refers to as “Trolley Fella.” However, it doesn’t include the people who are part of the Tesco system beyond England—in a Bangladeshi garment factory (where Tesco’s Florence and Fred clothing is produced), say, or a Congolese coltan mine (digging up minerals destined for the electronics aisle), or a Ugandan clothing market (where discarded fast fashion is processed and resold).
The narrator does pay attention, for one sustained moment, to the elsewhere that is both origin and destination for the products in the superstore. He is instructed to dispose of a shipment of out-of-date kalamata olives, and he thinks of all the people in the UK who are going hungry. “But there are also the people in the green hills of the Peloponnese who suffer,” he reflects. He pictures the olives growing in the “clean Hellenic light” of a “silvery olive grove.” He considers their cultivation and export, their passage, their few hours on the superstore shelves. Then they go in the dumpster.
The passage is memorable because it seems so far from the novel’s righteously furious descriptions of how wealth and food are created and distributed. Yet its idyllic, color-saturated vision of “green hills” feels like an evasion. Tesco has sold groceries all over the planet, from Thailand to Slovakia. In 2013, when the novel is set, Tesco was the second-largest retailer in the world. In a tightly plotted novel, the absence of this hinterland might be necessary to the structure, but here, in a book that tells us all about the songs on the in-store playlist, transliterates the accent profiles on Tesco ads, and interprets the red, white, and blue of the company logo, the omission feels significant.
In recent years there have been a number of literary novels set in supermarkets and stocking warehouses. A Working Title I Want to Change aligns most closely with Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted (2024), set in a superstore in upstate New York, and Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (2014; translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, 2018), about the author’s time working at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. The three novels are different in form, tone, and setting—Waldman is writing social realist fiction, Geissler autofiction, Leslie satire—but linked in that the system itself is their central subject. They feature behind-the-scenes labor in warehouses and back rooms that is rarely glimpsed by customers. The books are all based on the authors’ personal experiences of working for these stores—a period of witness. Waldman worked in a big-box store while researching her novel, and Geissler originally wrote Seasonal Associate as a memoir.
Waldman’s novel is the most fully fictionalized: it’s carefully plotted, set in an invented store named Town Square, and rather than being told from the point of view of a literary aspirant—somebody who sees this job as temporary—it enters deeply into the experiences of a group of coworkers who are, for different reasons, bound permanently to their harsh conditions.1 They have no health care, they can’t unionize, and many are ineligible even to apply for a promotion because they don’t have the requisite college degree. These terms of employment are designed by executives and consultants and implicitly accepted by customers.
A Working Title I Want to Change is less interested in the lives of its narrator’s coworkers. Leslie relies heavily on ready-mades, familiar shorthand, and generalized descriptions. Posh people wear boat shoes and say “yah”; Trolley Fella intones, “’av ye got a spare two paaand coin?” Children are denoted by the use of the letter “w” (“Pweese, daddy”; “Mummy, is that man in twubble?”). A female character is referred to as “the pretty girl” thirteen times.
These conveniences come at a cost. They have a dulling effect. It’s a challenge to see Trolley Fella as a person who has had various unique experiences. Caricature can be a pleasure, but at times I wondered whether even “caricature” wasn’t too generous. The hasty sketch of Florence reads like notes toward one: “Her voice is of the Keira Knightly [sic] ‘gap yah’ variety.”
Perhaps this is a matter of genre. Class satire can be a mode of resistance that challenges dehumanizing typologies by exaggerating them. This isn’t quite what happens with Trolley Fella or Florence. Geissler makes the intriguing observation that a tendency to typologize is actually produced by the corporate setting, and indeed is a condition of it. She writes of her job at Amazon, “The experience forces you to your knees and down a social stratum, and that’s the way it will stay. Yes, you’ll start to see strata in society, if you don’t already.”
In Leslie’s novel the narrator’s name badge never arrives at his branch of Tesco, and so he pins on a spare for every shift, becoming Samuel, Michael, or Judith. This detail suggests that people are rendered interchangeable by the very corporate processes (such as the distribution of personalized name tags) that are supposed to give them human dignity. Yet characterization can also confer dignity, and Leslie’s derisive descriptions of Tesco managers and Trolley Fella blur uneasily into his unnamed narrator’s experiences of being constantly diminished.
Like A Working Title I Want to Change, Help Wanted is a novel of the nation rather than the globe. Character arcs are determined by circumstances specific to the US: health insurance policy and unionization law; jokes that assume that readers will have memorized the Second Amendment. Seasonal Associate, by contrast, is set in Amazon’s Germany—it is transnational from the outset. During an induction session, a manager elaborates on US terminology and how it must be applied in the primarily German-speaking setting, concluding, “America is a wonderful place, but Leipzig is a wonderful place too.” This apparently vacuous statement is corporate rhetoric. The manager insists that the new codes and imperatives are absolutely not imperial, via a logic of equality: wonderful and wonderful. Yet the Leipzigers are ordered to use American terms and modes of address in the workplace, as they repackage products made by laborers on other continents who are paid even lower wages.
Geissler satirizes an internationalism that the traditional superstore novels don’t reach. Her story is personal—she’s writing about a novelist’s precarity—and her novel cannot be situated in a tradition of narrative that tries to come to terms with national character. By contrast, Leslie makes several allusions to Dickens’s Hard Times, and my copy of Help Wanted comes with blurbs mentioning George Eliot and the “great nineteenth-century novel.” These references raise a question about how the state-of-the-nation novel (itself sometimes seen as a bourgeois commodity) is accommodating shifts in the character of nationhood. Multinational corporations, which traverse and manipulate borders, vex the form. Taking them seriously—trying to trace their operations, to show how they shape lives across opaque long-distance networks—might alter our understanding of what a nation is and how people relate to one another in it. It would also be a practical nightmare for the novelist.
A Working Title I Want to Change is published by Repeater Books, a small press that was cofounded by the philosopher and cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism” is crucial to Leslie’s vision of a devouring financial system that dictates the course of reality. (A portion of my payment for writing this review will, more likely than not, end up at Tesco, via my family grocery bill; even in reading these words you are also embedded in this system. Unless you pirated, shoplifted, or borrowed your copy of The New York Review of Books—in which case, fair play to you.) Leslie’s story is illuminating when he plainly shows how capital insinuates itself into every relationship and claims priority over human lives. Because the novel is so reeling and digressive, this process rarely acquires the awful power it has for Waldman’s characters in Help Wanted. There are, however, points at which Leslie makes it felt.
When the narrator’s possessions spill out of his rucksack while he is in the pub with university colleagues, a professor, Mair, recognizes his predicament. She was also homeless as a student: “It’s hard. I can relate.” She offers him her spare room, then takes it back the following day—it wouldn’t be appropriate. Instead she refers him to a student liaison committee “to discuss…the troubles you’ve been having.” A meeting is set up. At last, he feels, someone will help with his homelessness. He moves from sofa to sofa as he counts down the days. At the interview, however, he quickly realizes that the liaison officers have no intention of resolving his housing situation. They are assessing “whether I was fit enough to study or compost mentis [sic].” They refer him to mental health support and advise a suspension of studies.
This is a terrible and startling moment—it’s at once outrageous and absolutely credible that the narrator’s homelessness would be interpreted by university administrators as evidence of a mental health problem. (Fisher also wrote about this “privatisation of stress,” a culture in which workers have been “persuaded to accept” that their deteriorating circumstances are “‘natural,’ and to look inward—into their brain chemistry or into their personal history—for the sources of any stress they may be feeling.”)2 Like the narrator, I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it coming. What will happen to him now?
The novel itself eventually abandons this trajectory, along with the other threads that run raggedly through it: a letter the narrator is drafting to his brother, who is incarcerated, another lead on his housing situation, and his interactions with various pretty girls. Instead, in the novel’s final pages, someone the narrator just met at a gas station tells him a convoluted ghost story involving vegetarian meat substitutes and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Then, abruptly, everything unravels. The long final scene enacts an absurdist fantasy in which the narrator and his colleagues spray food into baying crowds of needy customers. Their rebellion ends with a sharp double take that asks the reader to consider the narrator’s situation and what reaction might realistically feel available to him. Leslie’s vision of cathartic redistribution is absurd and beautiful but very short lived—a mere moment of triumph.