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A review by shimmer
Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera
First, in the interest of full disclosure, Alex Kudera and I share a publisher, so bear that in mind as you will, though it isn't the reason for my interest in Fight For Your Long Day. Like Kudera's protagonist Duffy, I make my living teaching writing to undergraduates. Not, I'm relieved to say, under such grim conditions as those Duffy experiences, but I've heard enough stories from colleagues and friends to know that what Duffy encounters teaching on four urban campuses in Philadelphia, each with its own distinct corporate/academic culture and internal, internecine conflicts between students, faculty, and administration may be satirically exaggerated but not inaccurate. So I picked the novel up because it is, so far as I know, the first campus novel to approach the genre from the perspective of contingent faculty; it's The Jungle for adjuncts -- equally critical, equally frightening, equally gruesome, and just as much a demonstration of the need for change. I can't speak to whether the sections of the novel most directly focused on the mechanics and machinations of the writing classroom and composition will be as engaging to a reader outside the field as they were to me, but fortunately the book is more than an indictment of academic labor practices (and, for that matter, The Jungle was meant as a critique of worker mistreatment, but that isn't why we're still talking about it).
Fight For Your Long Day is also, thank goodness, an engaging read, one that works as well as a novel as it does a polemic. Duffy starts out as a comic character, overweight, overworked, and underpaid. He becomes, though, more complex -- even as his commitment to teaching and "higher ideals" emerges, so do a knee-jerk racism and questionable set of ethics at odds with the liberal education he champions. The novel avoids reducing that to a cliché, passé, oversimplified argument about "political correctness" (that useless phrase), and instead forces the reader to confront Duffy's contradictions in head-on, human terms and through a discomfort that is familiar but often unspoken. The novel's biggest risk may come in reviewers conflating Duffy's prejudices with the author's, and dismissing it on those grounds. But there's an authorial awareness which (for me) prevents this -- emerging from (among other things) the knowing invocation of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes as a favorite of Duffy's, that novel featuring an equally contradictory character, simultaneously sympathetic and repellent.
That internal contradiction is mirrored externally by the novel's deep setting at the height of the war-on-terror, and parallels emerge between national paranoia and distrust of fellow citizens, and the paranoia of adjuncts teaching in unsustainable, unprotectable positions, unable to trust students, colleagues, and supervisors. That, for me, was the most compelling thread of the novel -- in the stereotype of the Ivory Tower, or the City on the Hill, freedom and self-determination are all, while down on the ground Duffy, his students, the unemployed (and underemployed) of Philadelphia, and all but a few extremely wealthy characters alluded to in the course of the story have almost no say in the course of their days and their lives. If anything, I would have liked the novel to make these criticisms even sharper -- for satire's sake, political names and details have been fictionalized (such as "President Fern," and the Reaganesque "William Winsome"), but the referents are so apparent that I'm not sure those punches had to be pulled. On the other hand, the names of the various colleges and universities in the story are also veiled (some less opaquely than others), probably a necessity for an untenured author and itself an indicator of the limits of freedom academic and otherwise, and of piece with all the other contradictions in Duffy's day.
Fight For Your Long Day is also, thank goodness, an engaging read, one that works as well as a novel as it does a polemic. Duffy starts out as a comic character, overweight, overworked, and underpaid. He becomes, though, more complex -- even as his commitment to teaching and "higher ideals" emerges, so do a knee-jerk racism and questionable set of ethics at odds with the liberal education he champions. The novel avoids reducing that to a cliché, passé, oversimplified argument about "political correctness" (that useless phrase), and instead forces the reader to confront Duffy's contradictions in head-on, human terms and through a discomfort that is familiar but often unspoken. The novel's biggest risk may come in reviewers conflating Duffy's prejudices with the author's, and dismissing it on those grounds. But there's an authorial awareness which (for me) prevents this -- emerging from (among other things) the knowing invocation of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes as a favorite of Duffy's, that novel featuring an equally contradictory character, simultaneously sympathetic and repellent.
That internal contradiction is mirrored externally by the novel's deep setting at the height of the war-on-terror, and parallels emerge between national paranoia and distrust of fellow citizens, and the paranoia of adjuncts teaching in unsustainable, unprotectable positions, unable to trust students, colleagues, and supervisors. That, for me, was the most compelling thread of the novel -- in the stereotype of the Ivory Tower, or the City on the Hill, freedom and self-determination are all, while down on the ground Duffy, his students, the unemployed (and underemployed) of Philadelphia, and all but a few extremely wealthy characters alluded to in the course of the story have almost no say in the course of their days and their lives. If anything, I would have liked the novel to make these criticisms even sharper -- for satire's sake, political names and details have been fictionalized (such as "President Fern," and the Reaganesque "William Winsome"), but the referents are so apparent that I'm not sure those punches had to be pulled. On the other hand, the names of the various colleges and universities in the story are also veiled (some less opaquely than others), probably a necessity for an untenured author and itself an indicator of the limits of freedom academic and otherwise, and of piece with all the other contradictions in Duffy's day.