'dear Committee Members,’ By Julie Schumacher

The book is, as I said, epistolary, entirely comprising letters of recommendation of every conceivable type, all written by one Professor Jason T. Fitger of the fictitious Payne University (pun almost certainly intended). There are letters to other colleges, recommending students of varying caliber to positions for which they may or may not be qualified; there are letters to higher functionaries of Payne, seeming to recommend for or against colleagues but meandering into other topics, such as how underfunded the English department is compared with the economics department; and there are letters to child care centers, corporations, RV parks, the USDA Forest Service and other nonacademic entities where many former students of creative writing will most certainly snuff out whatever flickering remnant of artistic delusion may have temporarily given vain purpose to the early years of their lives. Letters of recommendation are, of course, the most insincere of documents, in which we feign great authority on the subject of people about whom we probably know almost nothing. Professor Fitger, for one, seems to care little about that fact because, if nothing else, he considers himself the world’s foremost authority, which, it occurs to me, was how the veteran comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey (still with us at 100) was billed when he regularly gushed forth rivers of nonsense on ancient television. The latter, we quickly learn, seems to possess not a whit of self-knowledge as he prattles on to his ex-wife, former lover, deans, complete strangers and various colleagues as an increasingly transparent excuse to further elevate himself. Browles seems to have little sense of his own worth and even less knowledge of how to go about playing the role of writer in the academic world.