Note: I received an electronic copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration.
In my professional career, academics have occasionally been really, really snotty to me when I didn’t deserve snottiness. This isn’t a judgment on academics. When you work with a very large number of people from any demographic group, it is statistically likely that a couple of them will be jerks. But still: I have sometimes asked an academic a simple question, and s/he has responded with — instead of an answer to my question — a paragraphs-long, sarcasm-and-righteousness-laden treatise on his/her mistreatment at the hands of academic publishers like the one I worked for, the entirety of the scholarly community in that discipline, the university departments, or some other entity I was also not in charge of. It was punching down, because I was the lowliest of worker bees (especially early on), it made my day shittier, and I very very rarely had any power to fix whatever the problem was.
In other words, a girl on my career trajectory is maybe not the target audience for Dear Committee Members.
Jason Fitger is a divorced creative writing professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. His department is facing cuts. His next novel is going nowhere. His personal life is a mess, and his favorite creative writing student has lost funding. He’s raging against the world, and the world is going to hear about it, in every recommendation letter Jay is ever asked to write.
Dear Committee Members is good satire in that it points up many of the real, true problems of academia: ballooning numbers of adjunct faculty, reduced support for liberal arts, apathetic students, incompetent department chairs, the frustrations of using buggy online databases — these are all real frustrations. Jason Fitger writes the way angry liberal arts academics write, so Julie Schumacher is super successful on that front too. Nor does his unrelenting snarkiness in letters of recommendation imply fundamental nastiness: He writes warmly of his hardworking students, and even more warmly of those of his past and present colleagues whose work he respects.
I fear, though, that it’s a case of premise denial (a phrase I coined to describe that thing where you can’t suspend the requisite area of disbelief to enjoy a book). Like my dog Jazz when the guard dogs of Up start barking ferociously on screen, I was unable to convince my brain that this was not a real person aiming real vitriol my way. I kept having stress reactions as if it were real. I kept thinking that I wished Jay Fitger would consider before stamping and mailing these letters that they were about someone and to someone, and not always did both of those someones merit the level of inventive negativity that was going into them. And also I kept thinking I HATE YOU WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME PLEASE STOP I HATE YOU.
The book deserves more than two stars on its merits, but it and I just weren’t meant for each other.
Linda Holmes of NPR recommended Dear Committee Members. The other book she recommended that I read was Eleanor and Park. So I have learned the valuable lesson that while I may have overlapping literary tastes with Linda Holmes, they are definitely not coterminous. Good to know.