The New Campus Novel

I only learned about Geoff Cebula's self-published novel Adjunct because of a headline for an article  from The Chronicle of Higher Education decrying the new academic novel that dared to deflate academics in a new way and point out the tenuous position of adjunct faculty.  The article itself was behind a paywall so I was only able to read the first couple of paragraphs.  In that span, the article called these new novels "disgusting" and probably went on to make some point about higher education that most adjuncts would find ridiculous. 
In any case, it was enough to make me want to read this book, and I am glad I had the chance to do so.  To begin, the novel identifies a lot of problems for contingent faculty in academia.  (For those readers unfamiliar with this phenomenon, a brief summary: institutions of higher education like to hire on teachers contracted by the class.  Since this is contract work, the school only pays for courses taught, offers no guarantee of future work, provides no benefits, and provides virtually no path to permanent or full-time work.  Many adjunct faculty members string together a living by teaching at multiple schools and overloading their schedules because the pay is not very good.  Many also provide a lot of free work to the school and in the name of scholarship in the hopes of gaining a tenure-track job.  The outlook is bleak for many of these teachers and it poses a real problem in higher education that I won't get fully into here.)  The narrative itself centers around disappearing adjunct faculty and a sinister plot to repurpose them.  I don't want to get too far into the plot here because it gets a little shaggy and it really isn't the most interesting part of the book.
What is interesting is the way that Cebula chooses to present these problems.  The main character, Elena, is an adjunct faculty member who accepts more responsibility than she should in the hopes of continued employment while also struggling with her feelings of inadequacy.  Elena worries that the work that she does is not enough or that her scholarship is not up to par.  These worries are reinforced by her own institution by cutting the very major in which she teaches while loading her up with more work.  Elena also keeps comparing her own fortunes against those of her peers.  The novel is funny and depressing at the same time and it speaks very directly to those who have had a similar experience in higher ed.  The novel works mainly because it is plain-spoken about the difficulties faced by adjunct faculty.  Many educators have felt mis-placed competition with peers and feelings of inadequacy for not succeeding to the level of their own expectations.
Elena's central dilemma is not the mystery at the center of the novel but is about her vocation.  She questions her ability to stick out another year of searching for jobs and continuing to write and research versus giving up on the dream and finding work outside of academics.  This is a familiar problem for many who earn doctoral degrees.
So, I wasn't able to read the full article because I don't have a subscription to The Chronicle so I don't know what the author had to say about this book.  It started off looking like a defense of the adjunct-ridden system, but it may have veered off.  I have decided to be charitable and give it the benefit of the doubt because there are a lot of publications out there that are very willing to ignore the experience of adjuncts and erase the problem in academia.  Books like this one are central to reform in the academic world and need to be boosted a bit more.  The problems highlighted in the book are real and are a threat to the broader system of education in addition to the workers that it demeans and undervalues.