The Guest Lecture
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
With “a voice as clear, sincere, and wry as any I’ve read in current American fiction” (Joshua Cohen), Martin Riker’s poignant and startlingly original novel asks how to foster a brave mind in anxious times, following a newly jobless academic rehearsing a speech on John Maynard Keynes for a surprising audience
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Riker (Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return) spins a brilliant and innovative exploration of modern economic history in the form of a late-night waking dream. Abigail, a feminist economist who has recently been denied tenure, lies awake in a hotel room while the rest of her family sleeps. As she battles insomnia and anxiety over the lecture she's scheduled to give the next day on John Maynard Keynes and utopia, she attempts to practice using a rhetorical strategy in which she assigns segments of her speech to rooms of her house. Keynes then shows up in her imaginary house with a "worried grandpa look," and proceeds to give her a tour, sprinkling nuggets of his ideas and biographical details, "like pixie dust" in his words, in the various rooms. But Abby drifts away from her lecture and into the terrain of memory, priority, and stresses about her world, as well as the world at large—"You are not entirely powerless. But mostly, yes, you are powerless," Abby reminds herself. Distinguishing between Keynes's "two kinds of needs," food and shelter versus "wants masquerading as needs," Abby's metaphysical wanderings swell to a scorching condemnation of modern life and an empathetic celebration of its meaningful moments. It's a transporting, clever, and inspired work of fiction.
