What I pictured: Sorcery and Cecelia

The primary topic of the first forty pages of Freedom and Necessity: Hegel, I swear to God. You know, the philosopher. And his concepts of idealism.

So, yeah. Me and Freedom and Necessity got off to a bumpy start.

Luckily, I was on the bus and had nothing else of interest for my eyes to rest on for the duration of the bus ride, which meant that perforce I read past the first 40 pages and on to the more interesting bits.

James Cobham, unloved son, much-loved cousin, and passionate idealist, has drowned. Or at least, that’s what everyone in England believes. When his older cousin Richard receives a letter from the supposedly dead James, his whole family is plunged into a world of conspiracy, terror, and possibly magic. (Though, if I can save you some anxiety, there’s not really any magic. There are just some people who believe in magic, as some people did in Victorian times. (And of course as some people still do now.))

If you can get past the Hegel, Freedom and Necessity turns out to be pretty great. Shortly after James’s initial disappearance, his cousin Susan sets out on a quest to find out all about his past. She’s in love with him (claim her family members; she denies it), and ferocious investigation into his murky past is the method she’s plumped upon of handling her feelings about his (supposed) death. Meanwhile, Richard — who is living in sin with yet another cousin, Kitty — sets out to find out what on earth James is up to and what kind of trouble he’s gotten himself into. The cousins are working at cross purposes for some time, though they fairly quickly realize that they’ll work better as a unit, and they start to share information. (Though they still hold back some information from almost every letter they send; these are people who love each other dearly and want to keep each other from worrying.)

Susan’s a terrific character. I love to see a female protagonist who’s exactly as brilliant and bloody-minded as her male counterpart. Susan’s too clever to be put off by James’s typical grim-faced-male-hero tactics of trying to keep her out of danger by being extremely mean to her. She sets out to discover how she can assist James with the murderous bastards (possibly several separate groups of murderous bastards) who want his head on a platter, and before too long, James finds himself depending on her aid. When he needs something done, he’s able to say, Susan, do this thing, and feel confident that it will be done. And the greatest thing is that this is a life Susan enjoys (probably more than James does).

In sum, be prepared to skim past some droning on about philosophical ideals to get to a cracking good story set in the mid-1800s. Don’t hold out for magic. Most of the schemes are actually about politics. But they’re still good.

They also read it: Here There Be Books; Tamaranth’s Creative Reading; let me know if I missed yours!

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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.

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