The Adjunct
Academic novel. Or set in an academic setting, a university in Baltimore? Not a lot of research on my part. The title refers to the soubriquet used for non-tenured teachers with professor-type credentials but not income.
In passing the narrator mentions Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece of death-defying, genre-bending novelist rage, and it made me think, I read Slaughter House Five when I was an angry young man, maybe early teens, and it helped define PTSD before there was ever any kind of diagnostic code for “shell shock.” Just a commentary triggered by the text, mentioned in passing.
The Adjunct
The life, times, and loves of an adjunct professor?
“You should write a campus novel,” said Sophie. “Except instead of it being about professors with status anxiety living coddled existences in old Victorian houses, it’s about adjuncts with survival anxiety stealing bagels from department meetings and buying office supplies in the toy section of CVS.” Page 67.
From teaching campus novel. Metafiction, but highly entertaining as such.
The Adjunct
Thoroughly post-modern, up-to-date, a commentary on the current condition of the academic life, if not passing information on about the current state of our world. Brilliant, personally dystopia, and story within a story, all the proper literary antecedents are cited.
On a more personal note, makes me glad I didn’t chose the path not taken, and I’m stuck with what I know, or what I don’t know that I know.
