DROP AND ADD

In Bailey’s novel, an academic, fresh out of graduate school and plagued by self-doubt, begins a new job in a sleepy rural town as a lowly adjunct at a junior college.

After Eliot Becker finishes his English language and literature doctorate, he enters the collegiate job market with elation, but after a battery of rejections, that “glow [has] faded.” He finally lands a teaching position, but it’s not as prestigious as he would have liked; he’s an adjunct lecturer teaching one course in remedial composition at Eastern Tech, an unheralded community college. He moves to the rural town of Freeland—home to five bars, five churches, and two grain elevators—and finds an unassuming apartment above a drug store; to make ends meet, he bags groceries part-time. Despite his initial disappointment, Eliot becomes attached to his students and invested in their situations. For example, Donna, a married 30-year-old with two kids and an abusive husband, attends school in search of an elusive spark that her everyday life no longer provides, and Bailey movingly captures her excitement: “In class she is awake and alive.” However, Eliot begins to questions whether he can settle down and make a life in Freeland. Although he vies for a full-time position, his girlfriend, Merce, who still lives a few hours away in Detroit, refuses to join him. Throughout the novel, Bailey’s portrayal of the coziness and claustrophobia of small-town life, as well as the peculiar affronts of academia, is pitch perfect and often rendered with enjoyably droll humor. Also, the author affectingly details the 20-something Eliot’s desire to put down roots, connecting it to the fact that his father is deceased and his mother is away on a round-the-world cruise. (As he says to Merce at one point, “I need to be somewhere.”) Overall, it’s a marvelously engrossing read.

A thoughtful, funny, and touching campus novel.