Sam is in her early 30s, two years out of her English and Comparative Literature Ph.D. program, and, like many of her cohort, barely scraping by as an adjunct. When she lands a spot at Rosedale, an elite private college, as a last-minute replacement for an older professor, her problems seem temporarily solved. Sam is optimistic, even if her schedule is grueling and her salary minuscule; even if the classes she’s teaching—The Masculine Voice and The Campus Novel—are barely veiled attacks on the #MeToo movement; even if the person who hires her says, “I just need a live body.” Then, on her first day, Sam runs into another recent hire: Tom Sternberg, her grad-school adviser, with whom she’d had a complexly intimate relationship. Sam discovers Tom’s long-awaited new novel centers around an older professor “reckoning with his checkered past” as the “feminist movement sweep[ing] the nation” emboldens a bitter former student to publicize their affair. The premise sounds familiar to Sam, as does the female antagonist—and she certainly sounds familiar to Sam’s grad-school classmates, who close ranks against her. Reeling under Tom’s repurposing of their shared history as a springboard back into relevance, and stung by reviews lauding the book as “fiercely honest,” Sam begins a downward spiral that gains speed as she nears rock bottom. The harsh realities of Sam’s exploitation by systems that were meant to both educate and employ her are leavened by the character’s wry humor; however, the novel suffers at times from a reliance on expository info-dumps to underscore its critique of higher education’s abuses, which are more effectively explored in-scene. Regardless, this exposé of academia from the perspective of its most vulnerable residents offers a vital message at a time when it’s easy to forget what’s supposed to be at the center of all institutions: people—messy, unpredictable, and filled with fragile hope.
