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.
Two years after completing her PhD in English and comparative literature, Adelmann's protagonist and narrator, Sam, finds herself employed as an adjunct, shuttling between a pair of Baltimore colleges--one public, the other private--teaching 13 classes a week on five different subjects, including "The Campus Novel" and "The Masculine Voice." For all that effort, she's paid less than $18,000, with no benefits and no guarantee of employment beyond the fall semester. 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 and even taking a cat-sitting job for a department chair.
Sam's frenzied existence becomes more fraught when she discovers that Tom Sternberg, her former graduate school adviser, is a faculty member at Rosedale, the private college where she's teaching. Twenty years after his acclaimed first novel, and not long after the #MeToo movement, he's burst back on the scene; he's finally published a second one that 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. "As in a classic campus novel, I was a plot device," Sam laments, "an inciting incident, a casualty of someone else's story."
Adelmann (How to Be Eaten) paints a sympathetic portrait of Sam, who thinks of herself as "an oblivious academic baby of the prefinancial crash," and bemoans how she "spent the last decade studying stories, yet I couldn't find my place in the narrative." Struggling to stay afloat financially, she's engaged in a cutthroat battle with equally disillusioned and desperate young professors competing for scarce full-time teaching jobs in a world that's a slightly more prestigious microcosm of the American gig economy. Amid her employment chaos, she 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 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
Shelf Talker: Maria Adelmann's frank, sometimes darkly funny novel is a revealing depiction of the professional and personal challenges facing a young adjunct English professor.