A failed academic and closing in on 40, Lewis is an embittered husk of a man. At his Ottawa university, he is at the bottom of the academic hierarchy: an adjunct lecturer forced to live off the ill-paying jobs left over by more successful colleagues. He watches with undisguised rancour as people much younger than him “find a place at the trough” – the tenure-track positions now well out of his reach. His abandoned thesis, lying in a cardboard box in the mouldy basement of his apartment above a video store, fills him only with “deep moral nausea.” Read more…