The Adjunct

Adelmann (How to Be Eaten) offers a slashing tale of academia’s exploitative gig economy and the aftermath of the #MeToo movement. Sam, an adjunct writing professor with crippling student loans, thinks she should be further along the tenure track for someone about to turn 34. During her first semester at Baltimore’s Rosedale College, she bumps into Dr. Tom Sternberg, who served as her graduate adviser a decade earlier, and who’s just been hired at Rosedale after leaving his old job for murky reasons. Putting aside her uneasiness at seeing Tom again after their intense relationship when she was a student (the details are revealed later), Sam focuses on the “low, constant hum” of her interminable to-do lists and bounces between lovers as the semester wears on. Then Tom publishes a novel titled Casualty, about a college professor who loses his family and job after having sex with one of his students, and Sam is shocked to realize he’s painted a thinly veiled and highly distorted version of their relationship. Not only has he made himself the victim, but their colleagues conflate her with the novel’s antagonist. Consequently, she undergoes a series of personal and professional reversals and fights to reclaim her narrative. Adelmann takes an unsparing and witty view of academia’s “pyramid scheme,” where “professors are living in poverty while paying back student loans” and “everyone but like ten people are getting fucked, and not in the good way.” This clever campus novel mischievously inverts John Williams’s Stoner. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Verve. (Mar.)