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joejoh's review
4.0
This book tells the story of an adjunct professor in English who has to work five jobs to support himself. It covers one day in his life: his long day, when he has to work all five jobs. While Duffy has the noblest of goals at times, reality and his own human frailties make this day a particular difficult one.
johnmatthewfox's review
4.0
This book is Humiliation Porn. It describes one day in the life of an overworked, shamed, broke, injured, sex-deprived loser adjunct, as he teaches at multiple universities and moonlights as a security guard. Anyone who has ever taught part time for the university system should read this book.
brits_got_books's review
The book caught my eye on a bookstore table and I was intrigued (though the price deterred me); when I stumbled across the title on the library bookshelf a month or two later, I was almost giddy. As I began to read through, I could tell what places Kudera was referencing in his writing. However, just as Duffy's day progressed, so did the story, but I began to lose interest. Everything became a little too much and by the time I reached chapter 9 (of 12) I found myself easily distracted from reading. By the time I got to the last page, I could only be thankful that I reached the end. I just think the various events wrapped up into one day were just a bit "too much," though, I really enjoyed the idea of shedding light on the adjunct teacher's struggles.
loufillari's review
2.0
This novel was a continuous circle. It never went forward or backward. It started with a weak-minded protagonist constantly doubting every thought he has and every action he's ever made and it ended with our protagonist pondering if he'll ever make a difference in anybody's life. Because he'd like to, he really would.
The book spans a period of 16 or so hours so there's not much time for Duff, our main man, to alter his line of thinking, but that doesn't mean I need to enjoy spending 16 or so hours in Duff's head. Which is a good thing because I didn't.
On a grander scale, the novel complains a whole lot about government and universities and opportunities available to less or more fortunate people, and money, both having too much and lacking. This was a satire, but of course that shit's only funny for so long before I have to wonder what the author's going to do about all of America's problems.
Duff's an adjunct professor, which means he doesn't get benes or a large enough salary and we the reader travel Philadelphia with this man on a Thursday, his long day. Many events happen, most negative, and it's amusing to relate to Duff's very passive reactions to mental breakdowns and life-changing events as he ponders why and when he became such a nonentity to the human race.
Maybe, whatever.
The book spans a period of 16 or so hours so there's not much time for Duff, our main man, to alter his line of thinking, but that doesn't mean I need to enjoy spending 16 or so hours in Duff's head. Which is a good thing because I didn't.
On a grander scale, the novel complains a whole lot about government and universities and opportunities available to less or more fortunate people, and money, both having too much and lacking. This was a satire, but of course that shit's only funny for so long before I have to wonder what the author's going to do about all of America's problems.
Duff's an adjunct professor, which means he doesn't get benes or a large enough salary and we the reader travel Philadelphia with this man on a Thursday, his long day. Many events happen, most negative, and it's amusing to relate to Duff's very passive reactions to mental breakdowns and life-changing events as he ponders why and when he became such a nonentity to the human race.
Maybe, whatever.
shimmer's review
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.
charlesdoddwhite's review
4.0
my review at The Southeast Review
http://southeastreview.org/2011/01/review-fight-for-your-long-day.html
http://southeastreview.org/2011/01/review-fight-for-your-long-day.html
aaronj's review
3.0
3.5 stars. Could have been 4 stars but a little heavy handed on the political themes in a way that detracted from the story.
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