If you need a break from the noxious violence in the daily news and find yourself searching for a recuperative nighttime read about the loony haplessness that is the byproduct of a free and prosperous culture—well, you can do no better than to curl up with this ingeniously conceived, wickedly funny, and ultimately very moving epistolary novel.
It consists entirely of LORs (letters of recommendation) written by the curmudgeonly, almost-dead white male Jason Fitger, a tenured professor of creative writing and English at Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”). Writing departments tend to be universities’ drainage pans, catching the lost, the unusual, the unadjusted, and, occasionally, the brilliant before they are washed out into the great sea of sink-or-swim. (Full disclosure: I spent eight years in MIT’s writing program.) For many of these students, Professor Fitger is the last port of call.
Fitger’s LORs, shot out in desperation toward such alien domains as The Paintball Emporium and Wexler Foods, are lifelines attempting to secure entry-level, part-time jobs and unpaid internships—or, when they are addressed to a university office, under-funded fellowships and adjunct lecturerships. Here is a letter to Kompu-Metricka:
Fitger’s two letters recommending (a) a psychopath and (b) a girl dissolved in tears to the mental health intervention team scrape the bottom of the barrel—and are so close to what we know to be true that it’s hard to remember these are satires. But Fitger also gets to see the top: the indefatigable Vivian, who applies to law school, medical school, Yaddo, and, finally, to Fitger’s own literary agent in an attempt to finagle a six-figure advance for her “coming-of-age story purportedly narrated by the first genetically engineered human-feline cross (specifically, a human/cheetah).”
The unflappable Tara, a plagiarist, shows up on January 7:
The letters alone would be tremendous fun, because Schumacher’s social details are dead-on and her timing for punch lines is impeccable. But there is more. As the letters progress, Fitger’s biography comes into focus, exposing the ruthless egocentricity of a young writer on the make. He and several of the women to whom he must now write LORs on behalf of his students were once members of a fabled literary seminar whose leader—a cross between Lionel Trilling and F. R. Leavis—was a kingmaker because his brother was an editor at a New York publishing house. Young Fitger clawed his way to the top, and got his novel published. But his creative streak has petered out; he is divorced, abandoned, teaching Payne’s lost souls, and longing to get back together with his ex-wife.
When Dear Committee Members opens, we find Fitger installed in a drafty office next to the leaky men’s room, writing LORs that are honest to a fault, matching the flaws of the applicant to the flaws of the place requesting the LOR. The letters show, in their quirky way, Fitger’s deep understanding of human misery; they add up to his best work yet. Moved by the fates of two of his students, one young, one aging, Fitger composes ever more desperate letters to secure funding that would enable them to finish their respective novels.
Dear Committee Members builds up to several moving climaxes that cannot be revealed but that lead us to conclude that the literary humanism championed by Trilling, Leavis, and Cleanth Brooks was a marvelous thing—and isn’t quite dead yet. Julie Schumacher is one of its heirs.
Susanne Klingenstein is the author, most recently, of a biography of the Yiddish writer Mendele Moykher Sforim.
