Dear Committee Members

Dear Committee Members is a brilliant gimmick of a book, an epistolary novel wrapped around the letters of recommendation of one Jason Fitger, a professor of literature at Payne University, a middling liberal arts school.

Fitger is an irascible curmudgeon, a horrific oversharer whose tale of woe at departmental budget cuts, construction on his building, academic politics, and a messy series of failed relationships is slowly unfurled via the letters he writes: Glowing ones for a favored graduate student who he sees as the next literary genius; Half-hearted ones for B- students applying to corporate jobs Fitger disdains; a few sarcastic and back-biting.

The novel has some touching moments of lucidity, and it’s fun how Fitger dances around how much of a miserable person he is; the cruel mockery of other faculty members, whatever he took from his three exes emotionally, his failures as an artist, and his responsibility for a ‘reply all’ email fiasco (a crime worse than genocide in my personal book).

The basic absurdity of the letter of recommendation, a middle-class version of the aristocratic letter of introduction, a kind of commoditized reputation that nonetheless demands actual thought and care from the writer, has plenty of room for exploration, and Schumacher mines all of it. But I can’t buy Fitger’s growth and transformation at the end. I’ve known more than one real-life Fitger, mediocrities who had one good idea 30 years ago, and who have ossified into miserable creatures living in small toxic waste ponds. I have no desire to sympathize with one, even in short fiction.

Let the letters fall where they may!