WORK TO DO

Nothing and no one is very cooperative—especially the weather—in this novel about life in a Texas grocery co-op.

Wernersbach’s debut spends one very fraught week among the workers at the fictional Guadalupe Street Co-op in Austin. The novel opens on a Saturday in hurricane season, following store manager Roz, a queer woman who's deeply invested in her work. “For most of the staff, this was just a job. But do the simple math and jobs were most of the hours of a life. Roz had made a decision a long time ago, when she had no money and was putting on the red H-E-B staff shirt for the first time, that she could resent every second of her time on the clock, and her parents for cutting off her credit card, or she could claim a stake in the minutes of her own life by caring about what she did. The work was meaningful if you gave it meaning.” Shortly after Roz watches her ex-wife, a TV weather reporter, deliver the news of imminent gale-force disaster, noticing a huge new engagement ring on her finger, all hell breaks loose. The power goes out, customers panic, one of the cashiers is injured while forcing open the automatic doors…and we’re off. The unhappy, underpaid employees have already filed a petition to unionize, and Roz’s handling of this crisis will provide fuel for their fire. There are two other point-of-view characters: Randy, the 50-year-old nonbinary dairy manager, and Eleanor, the 69-year-old chief executive, who founded the store with a wealthy girlfriend 40 years earlier. Everybody’s hiding something: Randy’s messing around with Molly, Roz’s live-in partner, also an employee; Molly hasn’t told Roz about the petition; Eleanor’s keeping mum about her cancer diagnosis. Meanwhile, there’s more stormy weather ahead. Wernersbach’s depiction of their large, diverse, economically struggling cast of characters gives even the minor players their full humanity and their evocation of the Austin setting sparkles with verisimilitude, right down to the very affordable pitcher of Lone Star at the Spider House Café.

A workplace novel crossed with a soap opera, offering plenty of food for thought. (Organic and locally sourced, of course.)