DEAR COMMITTEE MEMBERS (2014)
By Julie Schumacher
Doubleday, 182 pages.
★★★★★
Who’s been keeping this amazing book from me? Dear Committee Members is the funniest book I’ve read on academe since Richard Russo’s Straight Man. Julie Schumacher, a professor of Creative Fiction and English at the University of Minnesota, won the 2015 Thurber Prize for American Humor and I can’t imagine the vote was close.
Schumacher’s novel–more of a novella– is everything one could want in a parody of the professoriate: literate, arch, and oozing vengeance, though you don’t need to have any university experience to love this book. Her alter ego, Professor Jayson “Jay” Fitger of fictional Payne University, says exactly what he thinks. His weapon of choice is the LOR (letter of recommendation) and he’s obviously written way too many.
Fitger is a divorced, aging horndog whose infidelities with grad students and colleagues are the reason he’s single. His ex-wife Janet, now in charge of law school admissions, only submits to have lunch with him twice a year– on the date of their wedding and the anniversary of their divorce. Jay is vain and uses his erudition and enormous vocabulary to club perceived inferiors into submission Neanderthal-style. Payne’s English department is so dysfunctional that everyone in it–except for its invisible adjuncts–despise each other with such fervor that Ted, a member of the sociology department, is appointed to chair it. Ted is so anxious to exit that viper pit that he suggests Jay should chair, but Fitger knows he’s burned more bridges than there are rivers to cross.
Jay’s office is in a building undergoing an expensive, messy overhaul, but for the economics department, which sees no need to have any humanities. Fitger loathes econ with poison pen, that implement appropriate for someone who refuses to fill out online forms. Only the English department’s IT assistant, Duffy Napp, comes in for more scorn and you can imagine what Fitger does with a name like that! He’s over the moon when Napp applies for another job and happily writes a LOR. Ahh, but there’s the rub. Here’s an excerpt:
Colleagues have warned me that the departure of ... our only remaining tech help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that ... a former mason or carpenter or salesman – someone over the age of 25 – is it this very moment being retrained in the subtle art of the computer and will ... refrain from sending text messages or videos of costumed dogs.... I can almost imagine it: a person who would speak in full sentences – perhaps a person raised by a Hutterite grandparent on a working farm. As for Mr. Napp: you are welcome to him.
Dear Committee Members is structured as a series of LORs, memos, and communiques. Fitger uses them to amuse himself and discharge frustration. He writes one LOR after another, each stuffed with asides, innuendo, oversharing, and acidic commentary. He’s the sort who is likely to detour into an admission that Janet might have a point that one of his novels is a soft porn version of their former sex life. Just what every undergrad applying for a scholarship or seeking a job reference needs, right? He’s weird even when trying to make the case for one of his grad student fiction writers, though it’s usually at expense of another student whose writing Fitger finds preposterous and begging for lampoon.
If the book sounds mean-spirited and nasty, rest assured it’s not. Dear Committee Members is like a speech you compose in your head to suggest your boss commit a biologically impossible act. Of course, you never actually say those things, but Fitger does! As we read–more like rip through–one LOR after another, you’ll find yourself splitting a gut in laughter. Who wouldn’t like to tell that person you barely know and begs you for a LOR that insofar as you know, their major accomplishment is that they don’t slobber in public? This novel will make you guffaw with such gusto that you’ll double over when trying to read it aloud to another.
The Napp LOR isn’t even come close to being the funniest in the book; I quoted it because I’m one of many who find IT people infuriating. Dear Committee Members is so quirky and offbeat that it could have been subtitled Id Unchained. But I suspect all of us have a bit of Jay Fitger lurking within.
Rob Weir
PS: If you’re one of my former students, rest assured I never wrote a LOR like the ones in this book.
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