Novels about academia have never held a strong appeal for me; there seems very little at stake in the tweed-clad genre except for tenure, which doesn’t make for the most riveting reading. But in Alex Kudera’s debut satirical novel, Fight for Your Long Day, there is a lot more on the line for the protagonist, Cyrus Duffleman, than mere tenure: his very life, it seems, is doomed to extinction as the world around him erupts into a frenzy of violence.

Cyrus is a breed of university Everyman known as “the adjunct.” If you’ve ever stepped foot in an English 101 or an Introduction to History class, you have seen one: rumpled and coffee-stained, adjuncts are usually in a mid-career or mid-life slump, or in Cyrus’s case, a state of perpetual ennui. [Full disclosure: I am an adjunct, but I make an adequate attempt to wear clean, ironed shirts, and I take St. John’s Wort capsules to stave off any impending mid-life crises.]

Duffleman sees himself “as a foot soldier on the front lines of America’s knowledge-based economy.” And soldier he is, for on this Thursday, when he teaches not only four courses but works as a tutor and as a security guard to supplement his middling pay, he will come across numerous varieties of that higher education anomaly known as the “disturbed” student: one who has a psychic breakdown in Duffleman’s first class; another who sends him inappropriate — and near threatening — emails; yet another who leaps to his death from the roof of the dormitory. And in the midst of all this, a renegade armed with a bow and arrow is killing wildlife in Fairmount Park, an act of barbarism that has the media fear-mongers agitated.

What’s an underpaid adjunct without any medical benefits to do? If you’re Duffleman, a committed teacher — remember those? — you simply do your job. But that’s becoming increasingly impossible in this discordant world, as Duffleman must act both as psychiatric counselor and General Nanny to the uproarious, unfocused, aggressive and all-but tuition-exploited students enrolled in his lower shelf classes.

The educational institutions in Kudera’s novel are education factories, more concerned with dollars and high student enrollment than in providing quality and affordable education. The tenured class, those with the puny administrative power, comes across as revoltingly grotesque and yet ultimately, recognizable. Kudera’s jabs are shockingly effective:

“From the daily papers, he knows one professor murdered his wife and another was convicted of testing the date-rape drug on  a research assistant. A third came back from Southeast Asia with a laptop full of seven- to twelve-year-old smiles, torsos, and bare behinds, and a master of library science was caught in the hidden corridors of power with a male specimen aged eleven or fourteen. There were rumors scrawled on bathroom walls of ssecret Facebook agreements to exchange fellatio for A’s in freshman seminars.”

In one telling scene, when Duffleman, genuinely concerned for the student’s welfare, reports to his superiors about the student who melted down in his class, their only intentions are to make sure that neither professor nor student intends to sue the university. (Penn State, anyone?)

Meanwhile, as Duffleman plods through his day, the bow and arrow hunter has opted for a taste of human flesh; the United States Undersecretary of Homeland Security Defense is arrowed in the brain during a university speech at Liberty Tech, and the entire city of Philadelphia goes bonkers. Every Left Wing and Right Wing and Centrist nutbag erupts. Protests and counter-protests emerge; while the cops insist on palpating every sack and satchel within reach, as though this were another dress rehearsal for 9/11.

The closing scene involves Duffleman and the bow and arrow sniper.  Duffleman becomes achingly alive in this moment, a moment that may or may not be too late for him and us.

I struggle to find contemporary comparisons for Kudera’s satire. Palahniuk perhaps, but less salacious and juvenile; at times, David Lodge, but with much more meat. But the ultimate compliment I can give to this campus romp is that it bears no resemblance to any other novel that I can think of. Kudera, an English instructor, obviously knows his subject intimately. Fight for Your Long Day is hysterical and sobering, and Cyrus Duffleman one of the great anti-heroes in recent fiction.

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