The Guest Lecture

Starred review from September 19, 2022
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. Agent: Kate Johnson, Wolf Literary.

November 1, 2022
Abby, an insomniac academic and economist, communes with John Maynard Keynes to keep the nighttime scaries away. Like Keynes, she understands that economics might include moral philosophy. She writes a book comparing "two Keyneses: the creative improvisational human he was in life and the institutional symbol of unchecked governmental expenditure that history has made of him," but the tenure committee remains unimpressed. Personal and professional failure looms, as do greater concerns: political breakdown, overpopulation, climate catastrophe. A guest lecture on Keynes' 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," may be Abby's salvation, if only she can get some sleep. Tracing Abby's restless thoughts toward a daylight epiphany, Riker (Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return, 2018) embraces the "didactic novel" genre used by feminist writers in the early nineteenth century. It's a risky approach; what some readers will appreciate as a helpfully topical map of one woman's feminist-intellectual development, others may consider a tendentious exercise. But Keynes himself declared that "words ought to be a little wild," and this clever, provocative novel, with its hard-wrought optimism, honors that call to disrupt.

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February 10, 2023

An economics professor who has recently been denied tenure, Abigail lies in bed awake the night before she is scheduled to deliver a guest lecture on an essay by John Maynard Keynes, ostensibly using a memorization technique involving imagining the sections of her paper as rooms in her house. What results is Abigail's nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness examination of her life and choices, her fraught relationship with academia, and a dialogue with Keynes himself, who alternately encourages, debates, and cajoles her as she moves through the "rooms." Her waking ruminations evolve into a dream state that will be familiar to anyone who has recurring anxiety dreams. In this welcome addition to the academic-novel genre, highly relatable to those suffering from imposter syndrome, Riker (Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return) challenges the trope that men can't write successfully about women; Abigail's voice feels authentic, and her ambiguity about choosing the academic life and the economics field, and balancing that with family life, calls to mind Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter (but with more humor). The dream section is also reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. VERDICT While readers wanting a conventional plot will be frustrated, those open to more experimental forms will find enjoyment and insight.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2022
An optimistic approach to considering the dismal science and life in general may be an economist's dream. On the eve of a guest lecture she's set to deliver--to an audience whose identity is never fully revealed--economics professor Abby wrestles with thorny theoretical issues and a few problems closer to home. Having recently learned that she's been denied tenure, Abby ponders her family's future (social and economic) as well as the opportunities and occurrences which have culminated in this night of insomnia in a mediocre hotel room. Worried about remembering all the points of her lecture on John Maynard Keynes' 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," she uses the loci method of memorization and attempts to create visual associations between parts of her speech and specific locations within her family's home. Accompanying her on the mental walk-through is Keynes himself (a circumstance that goes unnoticed by her sleeping husband and daughter). The essay in question is intimately entangled with Abby's professional life and, perhaps, also her personal life, as Keynes argued for a certain optimism in the face of the "Great Slump" facing England at the time of its writing. Abby's thesis is that rather than predicting a utopian sort of future for England, Keynes was using rhetoric to encourage alternate visions; unfortunately, her hypothesis leads neither to tenure nor a bestselling book. Keynes proves to be an amiable and encouraging companion on Abby's tortured traipse through the memory palace she has constructed. Addressing her as "Abigail," the revered economist urges her to liven up the speech with "pixie dust" details about his life and provides other clarifying advice as well in this unique novel of ideas. A thoughtful and thought-filled stroll down a life's Memory Lane.

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