The Adjunct

De: Maria Adelmann

Narrado por: Suehyla El Attar-Young

From the acclaimed author of How to Be Eaten, a fresh take on the campus novel that follows an adjunct professor gigging her way through academia’s poor job market when she crosses paths with her old PhD adviser, whose new novel might be about her—for readers of Worry, Vladimir, and Less.

Sam, an adjunct professor at a public university in Baltimore, takes a last-minute gig at the private liberal arts college down the road. Overworked and underpaid, she lives in a blur of back-to-back classes, side hustles, and job applications for an ever-dwindling number of tenure-track positions. Her already precarious existence is thrown into disarray when she runs into her former grad school adviser, Dr. Tom Sternberg, on campus.

Tom and Sam have a complicated history, and it’s the last thing she wants to think about as she navigates academic politics, institutional hurdles, and romantic entanglements with men and women that further complicate a sexuality not even she can define. Then she learns that Tom left his old job for undisclosed reasons—and his long-awaited second novel is about a professor reckoning with his checkered past. As rumors spread that Sam is the inspiration behind a central character, she fights to regain control of the story.

A hilarious yet sobering look at how hustle culture has come to define modern academia, The Adjunct offers a bold twist on a tangled MeToo story and turns Sam’s downward spiral into a searing critique of class and the hollow promises of the American dream.

Good story

It exposes the narcissism of academic men who always find a way to shift the narrative away from the victim to themselves. It is a commentary on youth, gender, asymmetry in academia and also its exploitation of would be professors.

Spare Yourselves

I made it as far as the beginning of Chapter 10 before the whining, the self-pity, the lit’r’ry pretension, the hipster proletariat, the career despair, the professional humiliation and degradation, the self-destructive drinking and vacuous hookups, the tediously granular details of personal-finance expenditures, and the weirdly antifeminist esthetic finally became too much and I simply skipped ahead to the (contrived, senseless, inexplicable) ending.

(STOP READING HERE IF YOU BELIEVE SPOILERS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN REVIEWS.)

Thank god I saved myself the drudgery of the last 100 pages, to say nothing of the outrage and confusion that drowned me upon discovering that Adelmann has her protagonist rush *voluntarily* back into the arms of her abuser. *So-o-o-o* not cool to “reward” readers with this utterly senseless neck-snapper of a dénouement! It’s a copout that spares the villain the retribution he so richly deserves. *The Adjunct* has set the #MeToo movement back three generations.