Title: Dear Committee Members
Author: Julie Schumacher
Publisher: Doubleday Pages: 180
Price: $22.95 (Hardcover)
This book first came to my notice in a review of new comic novels in the November 2nd “New York Times Book Review.” Brock Clarke called it “hilarious” and added, “if you don’t find those books funny, well, that means you’re a corpse.” So I took a look.
I’m alive! “Members” is a wry, small comic delight. College teachers, especially in the humanities, will love it.
The epistolary novel—like “Clarissa” or “Pamela,” an eighteenth-century form composed entirely of letters—is underappreciated these days. Letters carry the plot but also give the discerning reader insight into the character and biography of the writer. The pleasure is in connecting the dots, from letter to letter, filling in the picture.
The sender in this volume is Jay Fitger, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Payne University. Curmudgeonly to administrators and lazy egomaniacal colleagues, Fitger is basically a friendly guy, accessible to students, so he is often asked to write letters of recommendation, 1300 so far. He keeps track.
The most straightforward set is for Darren Browles, a writing student trying to complete a novel in which Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener is an accountant in a legal brothel outside Las Vegas. Fitgert loves the novel and recommends Browles for a literary residency, work study, grad assistant in the law school, assistant manager of an RV park, anything to keep him in school, even a job at KBPZ, the school’s public radio station—Browles is destitute and depressed. All to no avail.
Part of the reason, Fitger asserts, is that money is flowing to sciences, engineering, the law school, not to the humanities and especially not to English, where research and travel funds are cut, professor lines are reduced and exhausted, demoralized adjuncts are hired in droves to creep in at night and teach composition. The building is toxic with bad plumbing and asbestos. Perhaps, he offers “The deanery is annoyed…[and ] has decided to kill us.”
Also, three of the offices Fitger writes to are manned—or personned—by two ex-wives and an ex-girlfriend. (Fitger writes slightly autobiographical novels of sexual misadventure. An early one is called “Stain” and a recent novel is entitled, unwisely, “Transfer of Affection.”)
The Browles letters are darkly comic. The real humor comes in the non-academic letters to the private sector.
He writes to Avengers Paintball for Allen Trent, whose writing was entirely about “his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them.” Fitger writes: “consider this missive a testimony to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store.” Seth Padoman wants a job at Catfish Catering, which Fitger loathes. Fitger recommends Padoman “on the condition that you not allow him to consume any foodstuffs at your place of business.”
There are facetious letters to a liquor store, a weapons manufacturer, Annie’s Nannies.
To a state senator Fitger recommends Malinda Heisman, a straight A student, for an internship, but warns she will learn how he votes to cut funds for higher ed and has sponsored multiple “narrow-minded” proposals.
Fitger, a literary social realist, remarks with despair how his students’ writings most often involve gore, flesh-eating robots, exsanguinations in graveyards, werewolves, resurrections from the crypt, aliens and vampires and endless half-baked memoir. To his chagrin, Vivian Zelles, admittedly a genius, gets a six-figure advance for a pseudo-autobiography in which the speaker is a 15-year-old girl/cheetah hybrid who “devours and then remorsefully regurgitates her little brother.”
Best-selling literature today. Go figure.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
