The Guest Lecture
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With “a voice as clear, sincere, and wry as any I’ve read in current American fiction” (Joshua Cohen), Martin Riker’s poignant and startlingly original novel asks how to foster a brave mind in anxious times, following a newly jobless academic rehearsing a speech on John Maynard Keynes for a surprising audience In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself. Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes’s pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind—a piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifah—as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations. With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman’s midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.
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Abigail is a feminist economist lying awake in a hotel bed wedged between her husband and daughter, rehearsing her presentation on John Maynard Keynes she's set to give tomorrow. She's using the loci method, placing aspects of her speech in different rooms of her house that's she's moving through in her head, along with Keynes himself who offers up wry commentary throughout.
Which is kinda yawn TBH
Where the book really cooks is in the spot-on late night doom spiral, the dawning realization that past decisions have invariably led to this dark cul-de-sac. In this case Abby has lost tenure and, as the primary breadwinner in the family, the loss of income means having to move to a different town, a smaller house. And while she mentally lashes out at the sexist dinosaurs who denied her tenure despite her consistent publishing schedule and willingness to take on all the extra work thrown her way, she soon turns the blame on herself for pursuing an unsanctioned book project after a personal essay of hers went viral online.
It was a risk and it didn't pan out as she'd hoped.
She quickly goes from beating herself up over her critical misstep to dwelling on a collection of minor coincidences have brought her to this point, this career, this job - one that's she's not going to have for much longer. It feels like she never been completely in control. And then to all the relationships she's ruined on the way here, having lost touch, been called out, spurned, and ignored. And as she struggles to slow down the frantic gallop of her anxious mind, to redirect her energy back to the speech at hand, she can't help but heap on the self recrimination.
Been there. And that's why it just works for me. It's so immediately recognizable in a way that I haven't seen done so well.
...also lots of stuff about Keynes here for any budding economist, if that floats your boat.
