Abigail has just received about the worst news possible for any junior professor: she will not be granted tenure at her current university. As the only female member of the Economics Department, she now faces the unenviable prospect of finding a new job at a vastly inferior college so that she can continue to support her husband Ed, himself an adjunct faculty member, and Ali, her young daughter. To make matters worse, she is presently struggling to focus on a lecture she has committed to give the next morning on Pragmatic Optimism in the writings of legendary economist John Maynard Keynes. As she lies awake with her troubled thoughts, she conjures up Keynes’ image to serve as a spiritual guide and sounding board to help her prepare for the seminar she now views as crucial to her professional future.

That is the basic premise of The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker’s novel of philosophical musings, linguistic discourse, and one woman’s confrontation with her own shortcomings. I would love to report that I found the book to be both charming and intellectually engaging, but, sadly, it turned out to be neither of those things. Instead, the prose was more pretentious than illuminating, with frequent and seemingly gratuitous references to such topics as ancient Greek elocution techniques, outmoded economic theories, misguided indictments of how educational institutions function, the role of rhetoric in academic research, and so on. The result of the author trying to do way too much—and with too much showing off—was a story that became increasingly muddled and unfocused as Abby and Keynes worked through her litany of issues during the long and tortured night. And the lack of resolution in the ending was, to say the least, quite unsatisfying.

Perhaps the real problem with the novel was Abby, who was a genuinely unlikeable character. Labeled a “feminist economist” (whatever that is supposed to mean), she blamed everyone but herself—e.g., the person who hired her, her older male colleagues, her husband—for her failure to produce a significant enough scholarly record to merit promotion. Further, when her vanity book project was revealed to be highly derivative of someone else’s work published thirty years earlier, she lamented that no one in the profession had made her aware of that fact. As someone who has survived more than three decades as an academic economist, trust me when I say that Abby truly deserved the outcome she got, irrespective of the gender card she plays at every chance. If there are people in the story worth feeling sorry for it would be Ed and Ali, or even J. M. Keynes, who I suspect was not asked if he wanted to be part of all this. Unfortunately, this is not a book that I can recommend.

This is a lovely read, an intellectual look into how to deal with the real world.
That turns into a midnight crisis of mind, and dealing with things such as insomnia.