“Sign me up!” Because untenured academia, with all of its late-capitalist humiliations, is one of the few avenues of “consistent” work for writers, it’s no wonder that we are now amid a resurgence of what’s been called “ adjunct lit.” In this subset of bildungsroman (one of the first, best examples of which is Bernard Malamud’s “A New Life”), the cold realities of academic labor production thwart the naïve academic’s ideals. “More work for less money?” Paul says when his department chair breaks the news. “The Great Man Theory” opens with Paul being demoted from senior lecturer to adjunct instructor after eight years at a Manhattan college.
#Extra long toothpicks series
Also like Herzog, Paul experiences a series of semi-comic but escalating mishaps that get much less funny as the novel goes on. There is a sneering charm to his narration. Like Moses Herzog, Paul is hyperliterate and his mind races with irritation and juvenile glee. Paul most closely resembles the first of those men, and “The Great Man Theory” itself resembles “Herzog” (1964), a novel of complaint directed at various people and institutions in the protagonist’s life. Consider Saul Bellow’s splenetic heroes: Moses Herzog, Augie March and Artur Sammler.
Cranky characters often make for interesting novels, after all. Put another way, he’s the kind of annoying man you sometimes encounter out in the world: overserious, tiresomely enraged and boring at parties.
He eschews screens and seeks to preserve his capacity for deep, sustained thought about the things that matter to him - the environment, politics, history and the fight against the tyranny of the ready-made that orders so much of life today. Paul, the protagonist of Teddy Wayne’s new novel, “The Great Man Theory,” is an aggrieved Everyman who finds contemporary life unsatisfying.
0 kommentar(er)
