Review: 'The Guest Lecture' by Martin Riker
Pub. Date: 24/1/2023
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself.
Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes’s pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind—a piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifah—as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations.
With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman’s midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.
I myself am a woman in academia, hoping to spend the rest of my life teaching and researching and doing the necessary admin. While the idea of the "ivory tower" is not entirely incorrect, it also very much does not reflect the actual, daily experience of people actually working within universities. Even if we briefly set aside academic support staff (which we shouldn't, because without them universities would collapse) and only look at those doing research and teaching, many of us are not living comfortable, idealised lives in which we get to calmly read, ponder, and argue. Instead, most of us are living from short-term contract to short-term contract, which is usually only part-time, constantly moving around, and juggling six thousand different tasks at once. Add to that the usual suspects that make life harder (racism, classism, and sexism) and you can imagine that a book like The Guest Lecture, in which a young academic experiences a midnight crisis, would feel recognisable. Set shortly before Trump's first term, it marks a moment in which many, if not all, American people on the left spectrum of politics and culture felt deeply in crisis. I think The Guest Lecture could probably be accused of being liberal navel-gazing, but at least it's self-aware about it. Riker uses this cultural moment, and the accompanying strangling death of optimism, to explore not just the feelings of one female character but also the question of how we keep going and what we can affect.
Abby has a guest lecture tomorrow and she is not prepared. She intended to wing it, months ago, when everything was looking up. Now her academic career is in shambles and she has nothing prepared. Lying in her hotel bed, next to her husband and daughter, she uses the mind palace method, mentally wandering through her house and preparing her ideas on John Maynard Keynes' 'Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren'. Imagine her surprise when Keynes joins her in her wanderings and functions as something of a sounding board. From planning her talk, Abby spins into re-litigating her position within academia and reconsidering her own childhood and early adulthood. The Guest Lecture is something of a meandering novel in which, technically, nothing happens. It all takes place while Abby lies in that bed and yet the novel covers all kinds of themes, from climate concerns to worries about Trump, from childhood hopes to finding adult disappointments, and from insights into economic history to questioning the mental load in a marriage. Abby's anxiety gets the best of her at times throughout the novel but it is in how it gets reined in, how she redirects herself, and almost heroically attempts to look forward, that the message of The Guest Lecture can be found. It is a novel about optimism as a form of resistance and resilience, without feeling overly twee about it.
I really enjoyed the way Martin Riker plays with style and form in this novel. It opens almost like a play, giving us stage settings so we can picture Abby's surroundings, and then we spend the rest of it in her head, witnessing her intrusive thoughts as well as the magic vagueness of childhood memories. The stream of consciousness writing might not work for every reader, and at times it can feel a little claustrophobic to be stuck in her head, but all of that is, I think, part of the experience of the novel. We're meant to see what it is like to be stuck in Abby's life, her thoughts, her time in this way and then consider how we are stuck, what patterns we are in, and how our own worries might be affecting us. I have to admit I initially felt a bit odd about such a deep-cut into being a woman in academia coming from a male author. While I know men can write women accurately, there was something to the intensely female experience of Abby's life that made me pause about halfway through the book. However, as I continued, I did feel that Riker was capturing that experience in a way that felt genuine to me, meaning that it stopped being something that took me out of the story. Whether he had conversations with female academics or just women around him, I don't know, but I think he got it, at least mostly. What did occasionally change how I read was when Abby refocused on her talk and I suddenly felt my academic brain kick in as she started dissecting history, economy, and more. This might be different for readers who either know more about Keynesian economics or are capable to read through it without wanting footnotes and proper citations (it's like academic brainrot). Overall, I found The Guest Lecture a really interesting novel which challenged me both on a line level, through its style, and in its messaging.
I give this novel...
4 Universes!
The Guest Lecture won't be for everyone, because of its style, focus, or theme. However, for those who do find themselves dealing with an overwhelming sense of despair, either at the state of our world or specifically the state of one's (academic) career, Riker's novel will be an interesting reading experience!
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