Library's review
I have only written recommendation letters for some of my student employees who were applying for other jobs, but I could relate to some of Jay Fitger's exasperation with the process. Even when you can unreservedly recommend someone, it's difficult to write a reference that adequately conveys how you feel. And if you are ambivalent about the person who has asked for the recommendation, the problems multiply. I, of course, have never dared to resort to the sort of snide but witty sarcasm that the good professor employs, but it's a vicarious thrill to imagine having the freedom to do so.
I have no idea how this book would be received by someone outside of a university setting. I have read many a faculty recommendation letter in my capacity as a member of a scholarship application committee, and while none of them were quite as far from the bounds of propriety as the letters in this book, I could tell you stories:
* I have read recommendation letters that address the student by name in the first paragraph, and refer to them in subsequent paragraphs either by an entirely different name or by the wrong gender pronoun, making it clear that the faculty member is engaging in the old cut-and-paste maneuver.
* I have read recommendations that delicately dance around the fact that the faculty member clearly has no memory of the specific student he or she is recommending. (The dead giveaway here is when the first comment is a precise regurgitation of whatever they found written in their gradebook for that particular student rather than a specific memory of a student's work or class participation.)
* I have read recommendations that went on for so long and contained so much minute detail that only a second readthrough revealed that all the detail was not about the student for whom the recommendation was being written but rather whatever the faculty member's current research project happened to be (which the student in question may or may not have had anything to do with; you'd never know either way from the letter).
Fitger's letters are written over the course of an academic year. As the year progresses, we follow along with the English Department besiegement as building renovations (to create a more luxurious office space for the Department of Economics upstairs) create havoc and hazardous working conditions. Fitger writes a series of increasingly desperate letters trying to find funding for a student who he clearly considers to be the cream of his teaching crop. Other letters are in support of former students seeking work as, variously, RV park managers, data-entry clerks, and paintball facility workers.
What elevates this short novel above the gimmick is the way Schumacher gradually reveals the true personality lurking beneath Fitger's acerbic missives. The more he pretends to disdain his students, his university, and his career, the more clear it becomes that he is at heart a man who can't help being an idealist about the arts, humanities, and the value of a liberal arts education. I wouldn't want to be any of Jay Fitger's exes — wife, lover, or friend — but I understood and sympathized with him more than I expected by the time I read his final LOR.
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Fiction. Literature. Humor (Fiction.) HTML: A Best Book of the Year: NPR and Boston Globe Finally a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary." Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his....… (more)