Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is an like epistolary version of Lucky Jim, in which a jovial but pompous and generally unlikeable blowhard of an english professor bloviates and alienates his way through a series of letters of recommendation, straying from the task at hand to insert his own unrelated gripes and personal attacks, destroying bridges he has already burned, while somehow, admirably, also providing a narrative arc.
it’s just a little wisp of a novel, but anyone who has spent any time at all in the halls of academia will recognize and giggle at the frustrations and hoop-jumping plaguing professor fitger, poor beleaguered dinosaur of the creative writing/lit department. he, like many of us, bemoans the constant paperwork required of his position: overwhelmed by the number of letters of recommendation he is asked to write, frequently for students he has not even taught, or met.
he also suffers from the increasing marginalization of his department; professors shoehorned into smaller and smaller quarters while simultaneously being forced to take on more responsibilities, leadership positions filled by people outside the department or otherwise unqualified, equipment breaking down and not being repaired, and the constant din of construction being done on the economics department, which shares a building with the english department, but seem to get all the perks, presumably because their future alum will go on to more lucrative careers, with more money to nostalgically donate to their former school in the beneficence of their glory-days nostalgia. during my undergrad days at NYU, it was clear that those chumps in the stern business school had way more perks than the poor old stodgy college of arts and sciences, i guess to better prepare them for lives of privilege and schwag, while we shivered in our dickensian, poorly-heated rooms with industrial gray walls and smeared windows. ah, memories…
prof. fitger is also incensed by modernity, and the increasing reliance on/expectations of the technological world, whose cold automation displeases him, particularly since his department’s IT staff are condescending, when they can even be found.
his personal life is also in a shambles. he has left a trail of scorned women in his wake – women who are in powerful professional positions, from whom he needs to beg favors despite their messy histories, which they are not yet ready to forgive.
add to that the firework trajectory of his writing career – one giant first-novel burst of success followed by fizzle after fizzle, and you can see how he has turned into such a bitter man, using these letters to vent about his various personal and professional slights, and enacting petty revenges as he veers into frequently funny asides and anecdotes. but while he is generally frustrated with the number of LORs he has to write, he has also taken a shine to one student in particular on whose behalf he writes many genuine letters, trying to get him entree into funded programs and the attention of his own former editor, finding himself in the unenviable position of beseeching those he has himself pissed off in the past, who are unwilling to receive his requests favorably.
it’s short and funny, and also a little sad, but anyone who knows this world will find themselves nodding along, even if they themselves have never been a cranky old professor.
