As someone who was a professional student for a looong time, I thought I would enjoy this book more. However, it was quite dull and went over my head.

As someone in academia, I wanted to enjoy this book and find parts of it I could relate to, but I just...didn't. It was a little too bizarre for me, especially the writing style.

This is a great book for people who studied economics and/or philosophy and I am neither of those things. I wanted a peek inside academia and I thought this book would be fun, but it's...............not haha.

I liked and didn't like this book. I liked that it was a topic I could relate to as a faculty member and female and also a mom. What I didn't like is that I could relate to this book so closely and felt as if I was trapped in my own mind at points. The thought train this character is having was clearly inspired by current events many of which I have also spiraled in my thinking. So, I get what the author wanted to write and I'm sure that it hits several notes for most people but I'm not sure it works for fiction. Streams of consciousness are hard to follow and even connecting as I did with the stream, it still became to real and anxiety producing to want to continue willingly. So, this story maybe insightful to people who are high anxiety or in the field of academia, but for me it was hard to finish or find this fiction something that could entertain or even educate others.

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker, is the story of a young mother/wife, who is awake one night.. unable to sleep. As she hears her husband and daughter sleep, she is wide awake and anxious and can’t control her thoughts. She defines herself as a feminist and she was up for tenure for her job and she didn’t get it. This seems to be the catalyst for her trip down the rabbit hole. She has a talk the next morning, about optimism and John Maynard Keynes and she is wildly unprepared. So she focuses on a technique to help with her anxiety, she takes a room in her house and assigns it a part of her speech. This part lost me a bit. It felt like it was drawn out. I know it was symbolic but I didn’t love this. Abby is struggling to be optimistic and she is feeling the weight of supporting her family and the fact that she didn’t get tenure makes her emotional, room/house tour.. very emotional. This was a quick read for me and yet I didn’t really connect with the story or the character. I just think it wasn’t the book for me. I do want to thank Netgalley & the author for my copy, for an honest review. It is always a pleasure to read and review, new authors. This was a 3 star read for me. Let me know your thoughts? What did I miss?

Thank you to Grove Press and Netgalley for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review~

The Guest Lecture follows our main character and narrator, Abby, practicing for a lecture she'll be giving the following morning on optimism and John Maynard Keyes. In order to do this, she using a rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to parts of her house along with a great Virgil of sorts - Keyes himself. Unfortunately for Abby, she's no longer the optimist she once was and as she goes through the rooms of her mind, she finds herself spiraling about her own life choices.

Another solid narrator for this emotional downward spiral. It really does feel like sitting front seat to someone thinking about and planning how to give a big speech. I think it coming out when it did is also very pertinent in how it came across. Abby really was able to touch on how overwhelming the world is now and how easy it is to lose yourself in everything else we're supposed to care about. How she has her doctorate taken from her or was it really the results of her own actions.

Definitely not going to be for everyone, but really solid if you like lectures or TedTalks

Smart if a little didactic. Creative, visual, relatable, mild. Funny and silly. Informative. This is a book worth checking out for anyone who has given a lecture and spent a sleepless night tossing and turning about it. For fans of small stories.

Give me more books about women in academia! I want more about the struggles of the profession! The stress! The intellectualism! Give it all to me.

**Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Why is this not being talked about more? I love women in academia stories and the dry, quick wit was so dang good!

I loved this! It starts as a campus novel but gradually turns into a clever and thought-provoking (yet very readable) ‘novel of ideas’.

The entire book takes place over the course of a single night during which Abby, an idealistic economist who has just been denied tenure, lies awake and uses the time to prepare the guest lecture on Keynes she is supposed to give the next day. She is terribly underprepared and uses the ‘loci method’ to memorise her speech: imagining the different rooms in her house and associating parts of the speech with each room. And Keynes himself is there to accompanies her.

What follows is a fun mix of big questions and private experiences. Keynes proves to be a much more interesting character than I expected and the book makes smart points on the function of economics, not so much as a science to predict the future but rather as part of a set of political and rhetorical instruments to effect change and create a better society. It is not dry at all and it is weaved in with large sections where Abby looks back at her life, trying to explain where it all wrong and how come her career is in ruins. And these parts are equally well done and not less thought-provoking, touching on ideology, feminism.

It was great to read something by someone who has put in not just research but actual thinking. And on top the writing is really excellent. Reading this at a time of seemingly unlimited government spending felt especially timely.

Many thanks to Grove and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest opinion.

Published by Grove Press/Black Cat on January 24, 2023

The narrator of The Guest Lecture makes occasional but increasingly unsuccessful attempts to impose structure upon a stream of consciousness ramble. The result is insightful and delightful.

Abigail was on a tenure track in the field of economics, dutifully publishing once a year in Tier 2 journals. She became sidetracked as she thought about an essay Keynes wrote called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Although the essay purported to make predictions about future economic growth, Abigail saw it as making deeper and more wide-ranging connections between economics, rhetoric, and optimism. She wrote a “messy little heartfelt essay” on those themes that went modestly viral, leading to an invitation to write a book that explored the same vague thesis. The book was published to little acclaim.

Abigail was then denied tenure on the pretense that her work was derivative because another economist had discussed similar subjects, although not through the lens of Keynes. Abigail was not familiar with the economist’s work and while her own book was no more derivative than nearly all scholarship (very few journal articles represent original thinking), she believes “a grumbling line of bitter visages” voted against tenure because they had “a vexed relationship with novelty, always preferring to re-tread existing critical paths rather than blaze new ones.”

Abigail has a dim view of academic economists, a group of consisting mostly of males who are fixated on mathematics and measurement but never wonder about what gets measured and what (or who) gets left out. She has a similar view of academic philosophers, noting that Plato believed philosophers alone would understand “essential truths,” proving that Plato “never met anyone from our philosophy department.”

While contemplating unemployment, Abigail is invited to give a lecture based on her book. She plans to compare “the two Keyneses: the creative improvisational human he was in life and the institutional symbol of unchecked governmental expenditures that history has made of him.” She wants to focus on Keynes’ view of optimism, but as she builds her planned lecture in her mind, it is anything but focused. When she tries to follow the old memory trick of imagining each section of the speech as a room in her house, Keynes joins her for a stroll through the rooms.

The novel consists largely of Abigail’s lecture, or her thought digressions as she tries to construct it. Keynes helpfully scolds her when she’s straying too far off track although, by the end, there’s no track to follow. The initial rooms of the house in Abigail’s mind are filled with interesting ideas: her disagreement with Keynes’ notion that everyone shares the same desire for leisure rather than work; optimism as a form of antagonism and thinking as a model for living; rhetoric and Sophists; Plato’s elitism; the debate about pragmatism in the Western intellectual tradition (whether it is better to be right or to be useful); resistance to feminism in economics.

Whoa, Keynes warns, you don’t have enough time to cover all this ground. But Abigail doesn’t care because she is having too much fun: “I am enjoying myself thinking about all of this: the history of rhetoric, the history of ideas.” The novel is, at its best, a celebration of ideas, of deep thought, of living a life of the mind.

But it is also a condemnation of living that life. As Abigail applies her ideas to her own life, she wonders how she came to her present (soon to be jobless) state. She faults herself for relying on instinct to carry her along with “a total absence of strategy.” She admires Keynes for following truths to reasoned conclusions, for his willingness to change his mind in response to new evidence, and wonders about her own aversion to risk. Or did risky decisions, none of which were well considered, result in the denial of tenure?

Where has a life of the mind gotten Abigail? Eventually, Abigail’s thoughts digress to her childhood, her failure to make friends in high school, the satisfaction she received from meeting smart people in college, the one meaningful friendship in college that faded away after graduation, her marriage and daughter. Abigail loves her husband but wonders whether he is, as a stay-at-home dad who stands upon his refusal to sell out to corporate America, taking advantage of her willingness to work so that he can pursue the kind of freedom from labor that Keynes assumes we all want.

Nothing recognizable as a plot emerges from The Guest Lecture. That’s fine. Through humor, sometimes biting and other times wistful, the novel tells a lively story — the story of ideas. The attempt to personalize that story through Abigail is probably necessary (a book about ideas wouldn’t be a novel without a character) but the story of ideas is stronger than the story of Abigail, whose self-doubt and resentments become a bit whiny before she realizes that nobody really fits into the world, that few people can (like Keynes) live a life of the mind and still make a difference.

The novel's ending invites the reader to wonder whether the guest lecture is even a thing. Abigail has been thrown off her game by the tenure committee and might need to plan a speech to gain clarity of thought and purpose. It is at least clear that Abigail is making a valiant effort to balance intellect and anxiety. She’s a likable mess who, the reader can confidently assume, is closer than she thinks to getting her life together — assuming that's an achievable goal for anyone.

RECOMMENDED

The author has done a brilliant job the unique style of stream of consciousness writing.The setting a rom a woman rehearsing a speech late at night.Running through her mind diverse thoughts .A book I will be recommending an author to follow. #netgalley#groveatlantic

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This book was definitely a unique reading experience. I liked the stream-of-consciousness-style writing and was impressed by the fact that a story with only two major on-page characters was still able to keep me engaged. I am not personally knowledgeable about or super interested in economics, but I was drawn in by the story's meandering and introspective nature. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a book that is heavily character-driven.

I really liked what the author was trying to do with this book, especially the experimental nature of it. However, I had a very hard time with the stream of consciousness writing style. It will probably work for others, but sadly I couldn’t get into it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for sending me an advanced copy

Abby, an economist who was denied tenure at her teaching job, spends the night before a guest lecture she has promised to give, experiencing endless “monkey mind” (as Buddhists would call it), or “extensive mental meandering” (as author Martin Riker calls it). Her dreaded lecture is supposed to be on John Maynard Keynes’s economic optimism for future generations, and the book uses a method for rehearsing a speech and remembering it by mentally traveling through the rooms of your house—associating the points or ideas you want to cover with specific places. And she wanders the rooms with Mr. Keynes.

Although I could identify with Abby’s insomnia and monkey mind—sometimes they were identical to my own—the recounting of the thoughts and weaving into them a life history didn’t work for me as a novel. For me, the book’s meandering just didn’t hold a compelling form.

I say this reluctantly since I did so identify with Abby.

Thanks to Grove Atlantic for the advanced reading copy.

4.5 rounded down

The Guest Lecture has an intriguing premise: a woman lies in bed awake in a hotel room with her daughter and husband alongside her, unable to sleep and ruminating on the lecture she has to give on John Maynard Keynes in the morning. The format is a stream of consciousness, guided by mental journeys to different rooms in her house (a trick used to memorise the speech for her lecture).

I was worried this concept would be too contrived or the execution a bit too experimental or inaccessible for my liking, but it was almost perfectly executed. Abby, our protagonist, reflects on the main relationships in her life, her failure to gain tenure, and her thoughts on Keynes - travelling seamlessly between themes and topics. This novel stood out to me as being totally different from anything I've read in a while, highly recommended!

Riker is very good, in his humorous take on an insecure academic who has just lost her bid for tenure. It’s a clever way to express the ideas of an influential economist, Keynes, without turning off your audience, who otherwise might think it a dry topic. I’m greatly interested in utopian topics, though, so that makes me a biased reader. Every time I thought the novel was going to drift into rhetoric worthy of a yawn, Riker brings me back to Abby and her family, all very engaging and well drawn characters. I especially liked Ed as being representative of a true Keynesian. You’ll have to read the book to find out what that means.


I found Riker’s use of the traveling through rooms in her mind as Abby tries to alternately prepare for or sleep before her lecture the following day, a wonderful conceit that allowed for a much more interesting flow of ideas than many recent stream of consciousness novels out there today (I ‘m looking at you, Ducks, Newburyport ). Abby’s humour and fearless self examination make this a great read. The concept that this novel is about an attitude toward ideas (Abby’s reason for studying Keynes) fascinated me and I hope it does you, too.


Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

With shades of Bernhard and Baker, or what Jordan Castro and Emily Hall have done in their debuts more recently, THE GUEST LECTURE is a novel about ideas. The entire action occurs in a single room, with Abby in bed thinking about her speech. But what a joy this was to read! Riker is a brilliant writer and thinker, and I look forward to whatever he does next.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley.

Good stuff, but may not be for everyone given the non-traditional story telling style, which is a bit free-association. It probably will have a niche audience even though it's pretty well written.

I really appreciate the free ARC for review!!

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Press for the ebook. Abby lies awake in a hotel bed, with her sleeping husband and young daughter next to her, but in her mind she is traveling from room to room in their house as she uses each room as a device to memorize a speech she’s giving tomorrow on John Maynard Keynes. As she goes through the speech, she keeps getting distracted by her own life, especially her failed success of becoming a tenured professor and what that means for her family’s future. Plus the spirit of Keynes keeps interrupting her thoughts. This is such a thoughtful and charming night of a soul not altogether at ease.