Dear Committee Members: A Darkly Hilarious Tale

There's nothing I admire more than a good epistolary novel. Telling a whole story simply through a series of letters is a feat that amazes me, and Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher is no exception. This is also an absolutely hilarious book that revels in its absurdity and explores some dark truths about the perils of academia, publishing, and gradually fading ambition.

The novel consists of a series of recommendation letters penned by Professor Jason Fitger, a Creative Writing and English professor at Payne University somewhere in the Midwest. Fitger has written more than 1,300 recommendation letters for students and colleagues (he keeps careful records of all these missives) and at this point in his life, they are clearly starting to take a toll. His writing style is blisteringly sarcastic, long-winded, and self-important. Regardless of who he's writing to and who he's recommending, each letter manages to feature several references to his own miserable lot in life and the various complaints he has against the college administration, the state of publishing, the insidious plague of technology and e-mail, and of course, the unnecessary hell of having to write recommendation letters.

Whether it's Fitger's rants about the Economics Department--which gets oodles of funding while the English Department slowly loses professors, is clouded in a construction-induced asbestos haze, and is led by a clueless Chair from Sociology--or his increasingly frantic attempts to cajole his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend into doing him favors for his students, or his furious tirades as he attempts to complete online recommendation forms, you won't be able to stop laughing as you make your way through this novel. It's also amazing to see how Fitger's writing style changes depending on whom he's addressing and the subject of the letter. His genuine recommendations reveal him to be someone who does care for his students and wants them to succeed in life, but that goodwill is largely undermined by his cantankerous and overbearing nature when he tries to teach others a lesson and rail against the death of the liberal arts in the face of modern technology and science. There are also intriguing moments when you realize that you are just reading his letters, not his mind, and that perhaps you can't trust everything he has committed to the page.

Dear Committee Members has moments of darkness, of course, but by and large, it is a spectacular character study, and a witty look at what it means to be an academic in the humanities today. It is a refreshingly quick read (you can easily polish it off in a few hours) but once you do, you'll probably just want to re-read it. It is a brilliant, biting novel that made me wonder if any of my professors wrote such horrific recommendation letters for me when I was in college. I certainly hope not, but in hindsight, it would have been really funny if they had.