In the acknowledgments for her novel The Adjunct, Maria Adelmann cites a 2022 report noting that adjunct and contingent faculty now make up 68% of college faculty, with a quarter of those surveyed earning less than $25,000 a year. Adelmann's novel is the frank, sometimes darkly funny story of one of those teachers navigating the many challenges of her complicated personal life while struggling to survive in a system that seems engineered to ensure her failure.
Sam finds herself employed as an adjunct, shuttling between a pair of Baltimore colleges, teaching 13 classes a week on five different subjects. Her student loan payments are so oppressively high and her bank account so perilously low that she's forced to supplement her meager income by writing product reviews for a sketchy travel website. Her frenzied existence becomes more fraught when she discovers that her former graduate school adviser is a faculty member at the private college where she's teaching. Tom has finally published his second novel, which pivots on a sexual encounter between its male college professor protagonist and one of his female graduate students. The story borrows some details of Sam's experience and lands her in an uncomfortable place with some of her former and current colleagues.
Amid her employment chaos, Sam also finds herself trying to deal with confusion over her own sexuality that's only heightened by the fallout from Tom's novel. If it sounds like a complex picture, it is, but Adelmann (How to Be Eaten) adeptly maintains all these elements in a fine balance, sustaining Sam's perils and the novel's momentum all the way to the final page. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer