Julie Schumacher is an American novelist, essayist, and professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Minnesota. Besides Dear Committee Members (2014), her other novels include The Body is Water and An Explanation for Chaos, and several children’s books. Dear Committee Members is an epistolary novel. The recipients are many but there is only one writer: Jason Fitger, professor of Creative Writing and English at Payne University. The letters are letters of recommendation—“LROs”, as academics like Fitger call them—written to various Payne University departments, to businesses at which Fitger’s former students are seeking employment, to agents and other contacts in the publishing industry. At the present writer’s estimation they number around 75, and they are all sent within one year’s span. Enough to have Fitger complaining to the newly appointed Chair of the English Department that “I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss.” English shares a building with Economics, and the second floor is being renovated for the benefit of the latter, so Fitger must teach “while bulldozers snarl at the door”. The university is squeezing the humanities to reduce costs, defunding the creative writing MA. “For those in the sciences and social sciences, sacrifice will come in the form of fewer varieties of pâté on the lunch trays.” Fitger is as much a novelist as a teacher, but it’s been six years since the publication of his last novel, and that one, Transfer of Affection, was both poorly received and problematic for his personal life. His advocacy for an advisee who reminds him of his youth, a young writer named Darren Browles, seems sincere enough at first, and becomes the sentimental core of the novel.
After his successful debut, Stain, which used his MFA program as material, Fitger ventured out with Alphabetical Stars and Save Me for Later, which concerned The Cold War and NASA, before returning to the “petty rivalries and comic (and sexual) misalliances in an academic milieu” with Transfer of Affection. Novels don’t sell like they used to, but one feels that Fitger could have another Stain to offer if he didn’t exhaust himself and his subjects with the letters that make up Dear Committee Members. Like the frustrated young writer and narrator in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, Fitger is ready with comic similes and other flourishes that probably belong in his own novel. The English faculty are “like oxen accustomed to the yoke: our hides thick from insult and whippings”, and his defense of a Professor Pazmentalyi contains this warning: “let it be known that, in the darkened, blood-strewn caverns of our offices, we are hewing our textbooks and keyboards into spears.” Elsewhere he haughtily corrects misplaced apostrophes, and uses obscure diction—”yclept”, “fanfaronades”, “flocculent”—for a haughty and slightly hostile effect as well as for fun. The jacket copy joke ("Finally, a novel that puts the ‘pissed’ back in epistolary”) is below Fitger but condenses the novel well enough Fitger has rage underneath the indignity; he is the bull, and the bureaucratic forms and niceties are the finicky chinaware.
Fitger is also “a dinosaur, a person who reads and teaches novels (not ‘texts’).” The clever Gwendolyn Hoch-Dunn, whom he nominates for the English Undergraduate Thesis Award, might have taken a postcolonial theory expert as her advisor, but chose Fitger with his warm-blooded humanism, his assurance that “the reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.” But “dinosaur” is a relative term which could be applied to anyone in the humanities. One of Fitger’s letters recommends a bright young lady who wrote a “sterling examination of the concept of secrecy in the work of two contemporary novelists, Louise Edrich and Jonathan Safran Foer” to the hiring manager of a firm named “Kompu-Metricka, Inc.” where she would be entering data in a “windowless environment populated entirely by unsocialized clones”. It may be that these young scholars and writers have not been well served by Fitger’s antics, or those of colleague and Wharton specialist Albert Tyne, a “lecherous eyesore” to be avoided especially by female students. Even the generation previous to Fitger is given a dubious representative, Fitger’s MFA workshop instructor H. Reginald Hanf, the master who favored Fitger while leaving his other apprentices to bitter frustration, according to Fitger’s ex-wife. This “HRH”, as Fitger honors him, is a creditor who cannot be repaid and now a dotard whose confusion interferes with Fitger’s designs.
Fitger’s protégé, Darren Browles, is writing a version of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” set in a Las Vegas brothel around 1960: Accountant in a Bordello, called by Fitger a “blistering adaptation/homage”. Whatever its merits, it’s welcome to Fitger by virtue of its contrast with the work of Browles’ colleagues, “depictions of haunted mine shafts, exsanguinations in graveyards, self-mutilation via power tool, sex between gargoyle and human”, etc. There are a few variations on this list, which exasperate Fitger each time and don’t seem all that realistic. What kind of a university is this, whose creative writing students are so taken with the gothic and the depraved? Perhaps if a majority are not English majors, this corresponds to the real stacks of writing assignments that those in Fitger’s position must get through. Far more familiar as an example of a undergraduate literary effort is the “mini-anthology of short hallucinatory narratives” submitted by senior Steve Geng, each story apparently written under the influence of a different substance. Finally there is the hybrid “mem-vel” or “nov-oir” by comparative literature student Vivian Zelles, narrated by a genetically engineered human-cheetah hybrid. Fitger, pressured by Zelles to query an agent, writes to him thinking it just possible that an independent publisher might be enticed by the work. She sells it for six figures. To his credit, the work was first a straight memoir which he had found “a bit quiet (that is, dull)”, and his boredom may have prompted Zelles to bring the cheetah into the lab.
The predominance of the macabre in Fitger’s students’ work, if not realistic, is a kind of strained satire: an exaggeration of how often Creative Writing professors—Schumacher included—have had to grade such work. It would then be akin to the exaggeration in the scale of Letter of Recommendation writing that makes this novel possible. The third improbability if not impossibility is of course Fitger’s tone, vituperative and threatening, in some of the letters. Absurdities such as hewing spears aside, there are his complaints contained in a referral of a student to the Office of Mental Health and Wellness that his other students ought not be “terrorized by a psychotic maniac” and the assurance that “should Mr. Innes initiate a rampage I will point my finger squarely at you.” This and other excesses are covered by a late comment from the department head, quoted by Fitger, that he “behaves like more of an ass than he actually is”. The novel seems uncertain of its mode, whether it is realist or satirical, and rather than finding a balance, has it both ways: the epistolary form, with its attendant dates, fake addresses, postscripts and other conventions, assert a documented reality, while the letters contain comic invasions from beyond the groves of academe.