Novel: Something for nothing

Novel: Something for nothing
Rating: 4 of 5
Genre: Economic fiction

Short synopsis: Academia is terrible. The religious right is worse. Women are pretty.

Longer synopsis, with spoilers:
This book is problematic, and I really enjoyed it. I want to discuss both.

First, problematically, the woman characters are, essentially, "the girlfriend", "the sexy secretary social climber", "the sexy student", "the girlfriends mom". In a book about academics, the only women we see in academia are in only a scene or two. They are disposable characters. The girlfriend offers insight and morality, but there's nothing important about her to the plot. We don't even learn what happens to the sexy secretary social climber. The sexy student finds a new man besides our protagonist, who rejects her because he doesn't want to get fired. Girlfriend's mom is bellweather for how the girlfriend feels about the protagonist.

But. I had SO MUCH FUN reading this book. Its about a new econ professor, who is on the job market and trying to get tenure. I've got a masters from a high fallutin university, and have felt these feels. There's even a joke in the opening paragraph that is maybe about my university.

Our protagonist is having a hard time. He's at a teaching college he's never heard of, and thinks he deserves better. He hears from a student at a place called CROSS, a right wing think tank. They want to publish some throw away work from grad school showing that abstinence education reduces teenage pregnancy.

Spoiler warning: It doesn't. The student who found out is scared, and develops some new econometrics to try to prove it. He fails, but did I mention he develops new econometrics? The kid is smart, and sends his work to a professor at UC Berkeley. Which, by the way, is slightly better than some right wing think tank.

The right wing big wig tries to blackmail the student and the professor. In the climax, during his interview presentation, our protagonist proves he's a protagonist: he tells the truth, knowing it may destroy him.

Instead: evil is punished. Our protag gets offered a tenure track job, in the town with the girlfriend! The grad student gets to go to Berkeley. The evil right wing fucknugger is publicly shamed by the very reported he brought to listen to the paper!

Evil is punished. Good triumphs. Academia proves itself. Hooray.

Just .. a larger than OK amount of misogyny.