Martin Riker, Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return, Coffee House Press, 2018
www.martinriker.com/
excerpt
When Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s extraordinary debut is about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world.
Riker’s charming and thoughtful debut opens with the titular Samuel entering young adulthood in a secluded community in Pennsylvania during the 1950s and early ’60s. Against his parents’ wishes, he secretly watches television with a neighbor, whom he falls in love with and eventually marries. They have a son, his wife dies in childbirth, and Samuel’s existence is further rocked when a roaming vagrant tries to kidnap the child when he is 3 years old. During the scuffle, Samuel is killed, and his spirit inexplicably enters the body of his assailant. Now unable to interact from inside this new vessel, Samuel spends decades bouncing from one body to the next, moving on to a new host after his current host dies, inertly looking through the eyes of strangers, all as he attempts to conjure a method to influence his hosts’ actions and make his way home to his son. This shaggy journey shuttles him back and forth across the U.S., as well as oceans, and much like the TV programs Samuel consumes, the bodies he inhabits represent a variety of narrative genres. Riker is a gifted storyteller, and his novel’s enchanting exploration of humanity and philosophy, of how humans connect with their environment and community, is unforgettable. —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The debut of Riker’s first novel, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, is so thrilling for us bookish types.” —The Millions
“This is a comic-philosophical novel, the other side of the same coin as Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’” —The Wall Street Journal
“A lush, comic, and bighearted journey through the minds and experiences of American strangers.” —Literary Hub
“Reincarnation, cycles of violence, and the history of television: Martin Riker’s debut novel finds an intriguing overlap between a host of seemingly disparate subjects.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“A darkly funny contemporary story.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is the needle and thread that connects life and death, grumpy old man and flâneur.” —New Pages
“A philosophical yet fast-paced tale filled with satisfyingly unexpected turns.” —Booklist
“John Donne once proclaimed, ‘I sing the progress of a deathless soul.’ Well, so does Martin Riker. His Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is a masterpiece of metempsychosis. That it also warbles and bellows so brilliantly about fatherhood and husbandhood, about the religious life and the mediated life, is an indication of Riker’s range, which is as rolling-field-expansive as his empathy.” — Joshua Cohen
“One of our finest readers is now one of our most exciting novelists. . . . A funny, amiable, wholly original time-bender of a debut.” — Ed Park
“By turns hilarious and tragic, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is a haunting and bizarre novel of twentieth-century television and other forsaken American landscapes.” — Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
“Funny, gorgeous, haunted.” — St. Louis Magazine
A man torn forcefully from his son lives many lifetimes trying to return.
This debut novel by Riker is an odd philosophical meditation on life itself and can be dryly funny and emotionally frustrating in turns. Our narrator is Samuel Johnson, a young father living in picturesque Unityville, Pennsylvania, circa 1960—and no evident relation to the eminent 18th-century English writer. After his wife dies in childbirth, Samuel’s only salve is his young son, Samuel Jr. But one night a maniac with a gun grabs the child, there is a struggle, and...Samuel Johnson is shot in the head and dies. Unpredictably, he is immediately thrust into the body of the man who killed him. That man dies soon after in a car accident, flinging Samuel once more into the body of the nearest person. “I tried every possible escape...but what was there to try?” he says. “No actions to take, no choices to make. Just awareness of myself as a being in nonspace, witness to a life that was not mine and had nothing to do with me.” What follows is something of a comedy of errors as Samuel lives out the lives of various hosts, mostly of poor character, including a long stretch with a heroin-addicted sex worker. There are some hints at redemption—Samuel gets a clue about what happened to him and meets another trapped soul who teaches him to gain some control over his host body. But there’s something unsatisfying about the narrative, be it Samuel’s judgmental, catty voice or his hosts’ pitiable, very human arcs. Riker makes some interesting observations near the end, using Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return as a touchstone, but the many lives of Samuel Johnson just don’t add up to a satisfying denouement.
A quirky novel that uses the transmigration of the soul to meditate on the human condition. —Kirkus
“This peripatetic novel somehow manages to be a thoughtful treatment of TV AND a beautiful statement on why we write books.” —Josh Cook, Porter Square Books (Cambridge MA)
“After his violent death, Samuel Johnson inhabits multiple souls as he strives to reunite with his now orphaned young son. Traveling between dark humor, unfathomable tragedy, and tracing the history of television in America, Martin Riker's outstanding debut novel Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return illustrates how the human spirit can persevere.” ―Caitlin Luce Baker, University Book Store (Seattle WA)
“Ambitious and memorable, deadly serious and unexpectedly comic, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is the ghost story you’ve been waiting for.” ―Michael Hermann, Gibson’s Bookstore
“Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is about Samuel Johnson, who dies only to find himself inside someone else's body a mere passenger. Though seemingly powerless to influence his host, Samuel is desperate to get back to his son and the life he left behind. That’s a fun and creative plot, which alone would probably sell me on the book. But Martin Riker’s debut novel is full of so much more. It's also about Nietzsche and friendship and what we spend our time doing and especially television. Riker’s long subplot about television is almost as extraordinary as Samuel Johnson's own journey. Is life merely one long repetition? Does television unite us or divide us? Can you live a life without all the boring parts? I don’t know if Riker answers these questions, but with witty and captivating prose, the journey to ask them sure is worth it.” —Kyle Curry
“A perfectly wondrous tale, wildly engaging from the start, so sure and graceful in the telling, so crazyhuman in the best ways. It is now one of my favorite books.” —Rikki Ducornet
Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture, Grove Press,
Black Cat, 2023
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.
“Martin Riker’s light, charming and shyly philosophical second novel, The Guest Lecture, details a tortured night inside the head of a young academic, an economist named Abigail . . . Riker pulls it off because he’s observant, and he has a grainy, semi-comic feel for what angst and failure really feel like. His antinovel resembles books that split commentary on a writer with more personal material—books like Julian Barnes’s novel Flaubert’s Parrot and Geoff Dyer’s quasi-biography of D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage . . . In the vein of Nicholson Baker, Riker is a noticer . . . In Riker’s hands, Abigail is good company.”— Dwight Garner, New York Times
“If you’ve ever spent a sleepless night worrying about your career, your family and the gross inequality of American life, then chances are you will love, or at least relate to, The Guest Lecture . . . A quirky second novel of breathtaking genius.”—Ann Levin, AP News
“It’s difficult to talk with Martin Riker and not feel hopeful . . . Talking with him, and reading his new book, The Guest Lecture, lit me up in thrilling ways about all the possibilities still alive—at least for books . . . Ebullient, lively, often very funny; Abby describes what’s most important to her in writing as ‘the life inside the language,’ and this whole book is so gleefully, wondrously full of that life.”— Lynn Steger Strong, Los Angeles Times
“Mesmerizing . . . The Guest Lecture is a novel of ideas and feelings, of feelings about ideas and ideas about feelings. If this lecture will be her final word on her subject, Abigail naturally wants to express everything. Living in ‘an era of overload’ can feel like a rush, and the book doesn’t deny us that. It bursts with philosophy, jokes, factoids, tense academic social dynamics and fragments of formative memory.”— Maggie Lange, Washington Post
“Chronicles the thoughts of a depressed economist named Abby over a single sleepless night as she lies in a hotel bed beside her husband, Ed, and daughter, Ali . . . The novel Riker has constructed around her nightlong monologue subtly puts her separation from the rest of existence into question . . . The novel itself is governed by a finely orchestrated sense of instability. Riker punctuates the chatty narration with abrupt bursts of self-castigation as Abby struggles to seize the reins of her runaway mind . . . [A] strange little novel of cosmopolitan solipsism.”—Nathan Goldman, New Yorker, “Page Turner”
“The Guest Lecturedramatizes with rare vibrancy an economist’s preparation for a talk on John Maynard Keynes . . . It’s a credit to Riker’s virtuosity that I forgot this almost immediately. Abby is among the most convincing female narrators written by a man, largely because of how capacious she is, and how many voices she harbors within herself . . . [Riker] discovers an imaginative means of reconciling realism to ideas. Instead of scrubbing his novel of characters, dialogue, and detail—or calling attention to their artifice through metafictional bulletins—he outsources the world-building to his protagonist . . . If The Guest Lecture is trying to persuade us of anything, it is not any particular idea but rather the value of the interior drama itself—and the heroic efforts required of those who are willing to attend to it.” — Meghan O’Gieblyn, New York Review of Books
“The novel’s juggling act is in combining an affectionate depiction of Abigail’s neuroses with a contemplation of ideas, specifically those connected to Keynes’s economic theories, which it fascinatingly unpacks. Keynes’s humanistic optimism for the future of civilization serves as a challenge to Abigail’s habit of regret, and in the dialectic between them Mr. Riker skips among a multitude of issues, from Abigail’s trenchant commentary on sexism in academia to her wry memories of broken relationships.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“A campus novel without the campus, a novel of ideas about the failing infrastructures that used to support ideas, a confession of the academic soul that’s also a tragicomedy of the first-world political conscience: Riker’s novel is a dark, layered, yet somehow also buoyant reflection on how very damaged intellectual life can be.”—Nicholas Dames, Public Books
“Riker’s novel is in good literary company as a book in which ‘nothing happens.’ In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Estragon tells us that ‘nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes.’ W. H. Auden’s poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ declares that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ Virginia Woolf’s story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ is a classic ‘nothing happens’ text in that it consists entirely of the narrator’s thoughts as she contemplates a small, round mark on the wall across the room. ‘Nothing happens’ in these works in the sense that they have little or no plot, but like The Guest Lecture, reading them turns our sense of the phrase inside out. What begins as a statement of absence transforms into a positive construction of an alternate world: one that questions our inherited sense of reality and shows how much we take for granted in our everyday lives.”—Dan Kubis, Chicago Review of Books
“The hyperactive brain of an insomniac in a state of high anxiety is some kind of place to be, as Martin Riker demonstrates in The Guest Lecture. This ingenious novel captures the maelstrom inside the head of Abby, a feminist economist, who lies awake in a ‘dark hotel room somewhere in middle America’ with her husband, Ed, who’s ‘allergic to ambition,’ and her young daughter, Ali . . . Fans of Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus and other works that mix intellectual pyrotechnics with personal stories will savor this novel.”—Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“Formally innovative . . . The novel succeeds in interweaving an essayistic impulse with the vulnerabilities attendant on any dark night of the soul.”—New Yorker, “Briefly Noted”
“This year’s must-read academic novel . . . As much an indictment of mainstream economics as it explores what happens when one’s academic career goes off the rails.”—Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed
“[Abby’s] voice is wry, funny and self-absorbed in the best way . . . I was reminded more than once of the mix of domesticity and political concerns that characterized the intense interiority of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (though it’s worth noting that Riker’s book is only about a quarter of its length). It’s rare that a novel of ideas should also be so passionately engaged with the life of the family—including marriage, parenthood and anxieties about personal finance—as well as economic theory. The Guest Lecture is a brilliant and important book that I will continue to think about for many years to come.”—Norah Piehl, Book Reporter
“Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture is like Ducks, Newburyport meets The Good Place meets The Chair, which is to say it’s an incredible book that you need to read right now . . . what follows is a bunch of gleeful tangents, diversions, deep dives into Abby’s past, and one Alice-in-Wonderland-inspired fever dream of a courtroom scene. There’s something so delightfully playful about this novel, about its willingness to explore the corners of the mind and to follow the firing synapses of imagination . . . The Guest Lecture boldly asks: how can we hold hope for our tomorrow?”— Katie Yee, Literary Hub
“This propulsive, brainy novel spans just one sleepless night, as a wry academic prepares for her swan song: a lecture on the economist John Maynard Keynes. The Guest Lecture presents lots of ideas about feminist economics and the biography of a pre-WWII intellectual, but it’s also very, very funny. It’s a true gift to step inside the protagonist’s unusual, playful mind.”—Bustle
“With wry humor and true wisdom, Riker, co-founder and publisher of Dorothy, a Publishing Project, transforms one woman’s insomnia into an enchanting and playful exploration of literature, performance, and the life of the mind.”—The Millions
“Riker spins a brilliant and innovative exploration of modern economic history in the form of a late-night waking dream . . . 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.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In this welcome addition to the academic-novel genre, highly relatable to those suffering from imposter syndrome, Riker 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.”—Library Journal
“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 . . . [A] unique novel of ideas. A thoughtful and thought-filled stroll down a life’s Memory Lane.”—Kirkus Reviews
“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.”—Booklist
“The Guest Lecture is so funny and sad and smart about its sadness. Its topicality isn’t cheap, but deep and earned—our own—founded in the way thinking and feeling have been ceded to politics, often by those of us who think and feel the most. Martin Riker has written a major novel of bizarro feminism, language, love, family, money, and whatever the hell it means to own, or make, or be, a ‘property,’ in a voice as clear, sincere, and wry as any I’ve read in current American fiction.”—Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“A wonderfully playful novel! The Guest Lecture follows a sleepless mind restlessly roving through major economic questions and inviting those questions into conversation with the everyday problems of inhabiting a house and a job and a life. It’s a fun read and an education, like the best of lectures.”— Eula Biss, author of Having and Being Had and On Immunity
“This funny, audacious and deliciously self-critical novel can be read as a fruitful attempt at fulfilling that old and beautiful dream of reuniting literature and life.”— Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet
“Rocking back and forth on a lectern made out of insomnia and darkness, brilliance and humor, Martin Riker gives us a gorgeous novel that turns the lecture inside out. Riddled with ghosts and stage-fright and love, everything it takes to give an idea breath is showing. As formally masterful as it is gutsy, The Guest Lecture is the spiel of a lifetime, a life’s work, a working life. If all lectures were like Riker’s, I’d plant myself in the very front row, dead center, and never go home.”—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk and Happily
“The Guest Lecture is a funny and surprising novel about failure, economic history, the logic of memory, and what it means to care for one another at this terrifying moment in history. Abby's dark night of the soul left me feeling something I had not felt in a long time—hope.”— Christine Smallwood, author of The Life of the Mind
Anthony Powell disliked speaking in public, as did Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Larkin and Max Beerbohm. Elizabeth Bishop is said to have been hopeless at the podium. Wittgenstein, on a dais, would begin to stammer. According to Helen Vendler, the poet A.R. Ammons’s stage fright was so severe that he wouldn’t pick up prizes.
I’ve long sympathized with these writers because I share their affliction. I distrust writers who are too comfortable with a microphone clipped behind an ear. The poet Kay Ryan has written that, at literary conferences, she resents “personality horning in on the real question: the words on the page.” (I love Kay Ryan.) Alas, playing a writer onstage tends to pay better than being one behind a desk.
Martin Riker’s light, charming and shyly philosophical second novel, “The Guest Lecture,” details a tortured night inside the head of a young academic, an economist named Abigail. She’s sleepless because she’s an insomniac. She’s doubly wired because she must give a talk the next day, one for which she’s woefully underprepared.
The talk, which is about John Maynard Keynes, doesn’t matter. Abigail was recently denied tenure, an experience that’s dented her sense of herself — she feels like an eagle outed as a mere tern — and thrown her family’s life (she’s the breadwinner) into peril. The house will probably need to be sold. A new, worse town will need to be moved to.
Her speech will be in front of a lay audience; she’ll never see these people again. Abigail is tossing and turning anyway in a hotel room, revisiting every mistake she’s ever made. Les Murray called this sort of thinking “the 4 a.m. Show” and I have it almost every night, too. How do you spray smoke on the bees inside your mind? Next to her in the king-size bed are her husband, Ed, who’s too nice a guy, and her daughter, Ali. They’ve come along to be supportive.
“The Guest Lecture” slips into a meta-magical gear when Keynes himself shows up to lend Abigail a hand. Here he is, with his “kind eyes, horsey features, white push-broom mustache.” It’s like the moment in “Annie Hall” when Marshall McLuhan arrives. He’s sympathetic but not overly optimistic. “Tomorrow, let’s face it, won’t go very well,” he says.
Abigail is going to try to remember her talk using the “loci” method, in which you assign different portions of your speech to rooms in a building that you know well. Then you simply walk through the building as you speak. Before long, she’s giving Keynes a tour of her house. This is the entire plot of “The Guest Lecture.” Along the way, we learn a bit about Keynes, his life and his thinking, and a lot more about what’s going on inside Abigail’s head and how she ended up, in her words, “screwed, shattered, hexed, scorched, gutted, mortified, petrified and whatever other words I can find to describe my self-immolation.”
She feels she’s brought the disgrace of tenure denial on herself because, after a personal essay of hers went viral online, she turned it into a lightweight, personal book about herself and Keynes. Her (male) colleagues sneered at it, and found it derivative. She didn’t hit her intense, “Glengarry Glen Ross”-style numbers, in terms of published peer-reviewed articles, soulless and grinding as they are.
Riker is himself an academic. He teaches in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, and he’s the co-founder and publisher of the feminist press Dorothy. He’s tinkered before in his fiction with reanimating intellectuals and their ideas. In his undersung first novel, “Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return” (2018), Johnson’s spirit moves through various other bodies after his death.
In “The Guest Lecture,” Keynes is a prop for a novel that’s barely a novel. (The other characters are sketched, as if they were James Thurber drawings, in a gentle line or two.) Riker pulls it off because he’s observant, and he has a grainy, semi-comic feel for what angst and failure really feel like. His antinovel resembles books that split commentary on a writer with more personal material — books like Julian Barnes’s novel “Flaubert’s Parrot” and Geoff Dyer’s quasi-biography of D.H. Lawrence, “Out of Sheer Rage.”
Abigail is more interested in the moral philosopher in Keynes than in the economist. It was Keynes, after all, who said that if economists were so smart — if they could predict the future better than the rest of us — they’d all be filthy rich. He thought that over time, through efficiencies and technologies, human beings would have more leisure time on their hands. The issue would become: What is a good life? How best to live?
These ideas animate Abigail because, now that’s she been tossed from her career path, she’s trying to work out what really matters. She feels like a failure in the way that many people do. She didn’t steal an old man’s pension, and she’s not living in the back of a car, but her plans didn’t work out. Her life is not cushioned with an inheritance; she’s not where she thought she would be. Here reality comes, like a torpedo from its tube.
A key text in this discussion, if you’re the type who’s interested in supplemental reading, is Seymour Krim’s essay “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” in which he admits that, at the age of 51, he is still not sure what he wants to be.
In the vein of Nicholson Baker, Riker is a noticer. He describes, for example, the “unconvincing coziness of carpet on a concrete floor.” Abigail recalls a psychedelic trip she once took on mushrooms, and she realizes that “your mushroom mind is mostly benevolent, while your insomnia mind is out to destroy you.”
Is family enough to get you by in life? The problem with family, Abigail thinks, is that “it makes you less crazy than you’d otherwise be, but it doesn’t allow you to get as crazy as you sometimes need to.” In Riker’s hands, Abigail is good company, and sometimes for a novel that’s enough. - Dwight Garner
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/books/martin-riker-guest-lecture.html
An original premise drives The Guest Lecture (Grove Press, 2023), Martin Riker’s second novel: Abby, an economist who has recently been denied tenure, lies awake in a hotel room, trying not to disrupt her husband and daughter as they sleep beside her and rehearsing the lecture on John Maynard Keynes she is scheduled to deliver the next day. The novel consists of her interior monologue as she plans out the lecture using the “loci method”: visualizing different rooms in her house and associating each one with a different portion of her speech. In its stream-of-consciousness rendering of a woman’s nighttime thoughts, The Guest Lecture recalls the Penelope chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (a novel to which Riker alludes on multiple occasions), even as Abby’s status as an embittered academic marks a crucial difference between her and Molly Bloom.
One of the most successful elements of The Guest Lecture is its incisive commentary on academia from the perspective of a formerly optimistic and ambitious acolyte who has been left thoroughly disillusioned. Abby is furious with her colleagues for voting against her application for tenure, describing them as “old men … poisoning the air with the rarified mouth-stench unique to … the smugly entrenched academic.” She reflects:
Being on the tenure track was like having Obama for president. There were global terrors and political unrest and social injustice, the world was its usual mess, and worse underneath than anyone realized—but it still felt like we were working toward something. … Whereas being denied tenure was Trump. … The world of security and possibility falls away and we’re plunged into a new Dark Ages where nothing is stable, nothing is good.
She imagines putting her colleagues on trial in an elaborate courtroom scene, in which she self-righteously makes the case that she has more than met the requirements for tenure, having published a book on economics and optimism, based on a “heartfelt” personal essay she wrote that went “‘viral,’ in the way online articles occasionally do for no apparent reason.”
But the tone of this triumphant scene soon shifts, as Abby begins flagellating herself for “embarking on an unsanctioned book project,” having known full well that, in so doing, she was “taking obvious risks with both [her] publication record and [her] time.” Abby feels, and resists feeling, that her failure to be granted tenure in a “publish-or-perish” world is her own fault.
At this point in the narrative, Abby, who struggles to remain focused on rehearsing her lecture, begins examining earlier moments in her life, attempting to make sense of how she has reached a place where, as she puts it, her “career … would reject me without any regard for how condescendingly I had agreed to it.” She laments that her course through life should be reduced to a series of coincidences: a college friendship that caused her to gravitate toward all things “experimental,” prompting her to sign up for a course called “Experimental Economics,” the professor of which would become her academic mentor and, years later, prove instrumental in helping Abby to secure her current position. As Abby delves into her own past, recalling people and moments long forgotten, The Guest Lecture becomes a meditation on how a self is constructed.
The premise of the novel allows Riker to demonstrate the links between Abby’s academic interests and her character: her values, her deepest-seated anxieties, her formative relationships. At the same time, in extending this conceit—a character lies awake, thinking—across an entire novel, Riker, perhaps inevitably, pushes against its limits. It’s not clear that anything finally happens in this novel, that Abby comes to any new insights or achieves any kind of lasting perspectival shift. Of course, she may believe that she has, but isn’t it simply in the nature of nighttime rumination to arrive at seemingly life-altering realizations that, viewed in the hard light of day, look distinctly underwhelming, if they’re remembered at all? Abby’s monologue recalls the final chapter of Ulysses, but the power of Molly Bloom’s narrative is that it allows readers to see Leopold from her perspective, after spending so much of the novel viewing Molly through his.
In contrast, the only real guest in The Guest Lecture is Keynes himself, whom Abby imagines touring her house, and who does possess a personality distinct from hers, but who nonetheless remains a projection of her psyche. In other words, what makes Riker’s novel an engaging, insightful read also turns out to be its greatest shortcoming: we can never get outside of Abby’s own head. - Greg Chase
https://www.harvardreview.org/book-review/the-guest-lecture/
When Martin Riker’s novel The Guest Lecture opens, its main character, Abby, is lying awake in a hotel bed, trying not to wake her husband and daughter, anxiously planning a lecture on the economist John Maynard Keynes that she’s scheduled to give the next day. When the novel ends, Abby is lying awake in the same hotel bed, still trying not to wake her family, still planning the same lecture. Or maybe she’s fallen asleep. I’ve read it several times and I can’t exactly tell. In any case, it’s largely true that “nothing happens” in The Guest Lecture.
Riker’s novel is in good literary company as a book in which “nothing happens.” In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Estragon tells us that “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes.” W. H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” declares that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Virginia Woolf’s story “The Mark on the Wall” is a classic “nothing happens” text in that it consists entirely of the narrator’s thoughts as she contemplates a small, round mark on the wall across the room. “Nothing happens” in these works in the sense that they have little or no plot, but like The Guest Lecture, reading them turns our sense of the phrase inside out. What begins as a statement of absence transforms into a positive construction of an alternate world: one that questions our inherited sense of reality and shows how much we take for granted in our everyday lives.
The Guest Lecture performs this transformation partly through Abby’s analysis of John Maynard Keynes, particularly his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” from 1930. An academic economist, Abby has recently published a book on Keynes and has been invited by a community group “somewhere in middle America” to give a talk on it. According to Abby, but contrary to popular opinion, Keynes wrote to try to radically transform humanity’s approach to economic life. In “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” for example, Keynes argued that with the right approach, humans could essentially solve the “economic problem” of how to feed and clothe themselves and could move on to the “permanent problem” of what they want to be, or how to cultivate the “arts of life.”
According to Abby, Keynes wasn’t arguing that this transformation would actually happen; he was trying to make it so. Instead of a scientist trying to establish objective truth, she says, we should see Keynes as engaged in “an ongoing negotiation of provisional truths through persuasion.” She knows that the world Keynes was trying to create was shaped by his Victorian background, but she’s not encouraging her readers to recreate Keynes’s specific vision. She just wants them to dig deeper into their imaginations and participate in the same project of worldmaking.
Much of The Guest Lecture involves Abby rehearsing this argument, and one of the novel’s primary achievements is that it makes this rehearsal so engaging. To remember her talk, Abby uses an ancient rhetorical method of associating different parts of the talk with different rooms of her house, so the rehearsal also serves as a tour of her house, complete with memories of domestic life with her husband and daughter. She also imagines herself talking with Keynes himself as she rehearses, and his tolerant, good-humored personality helps keep the novel from getting bogged down in economic analysis.
It also helps that the novel positions Abby’s reading of Keynes as part of her life more broadly. Partway through, we learn that Abby wrote the essay on which her book is based at a point in her life where she felt aimless and confused. Three years into her tenure clock, exhausted from parenting a 5-year-old daughter, afraid of losing herself to a career she wasn’t sure she wanted—at some point, she realizes that her argument about Keynes doubles as a reminder that she chose her career because she, too, thought she could write her way to a different world.
We also learn that Abby has recently been denied tenure, despite publishing at a satisfactory rate, teaching well, and performing an acceptable amount of service. She suspects sexism, but it still adds a layer of self-doubt to her reflections. It also sends Abby into a rabbit hole of self-analysis, narrating stories of the most important relationships in her life, trying to make sense of things. She doesn’t come to any conclusions, but her stories demonstrate the same mix of thoughtfulness and humility that characterize her economic work. In an interview after his compelling first novel, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, Riker explained that he’s always wanted his writing to seem “friendly, approachable.” He also mentioned that his favorite writers “read like they might easily live next-door to you. You can go over and borrow their lawnmowers, plus they write these wonderful, interesting things.” These all serve as perfect descriptions, I think, of the voice that Riker creates in The Guest Lecture.
And still, the voice is not disembodied. Just as Beckett’s characters are not merely symbols but are embodied, historical beings who call for attention and care, Abby’s recollections happen while she’s in bed with her husband and daughter. Rather than risk waking them up by turning on a light or checking the time, she spends the entire novel motionless, letting them sleep. Late in the book she calls it “the only truly selfless act” she’s ever performed. I doubt that’s true, but it’s nice regardless. And maybe it can remind us that making new worlds can start by caring for those closest to us. - Dan Kubis
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2023/01/27/cultivating-the-arts-of-life-in-the-guest-lecture/
The book world needspractical dreamers. Enter publisher-novelist Martin Riker
A Young Academic Ponders Her Failures in an Insomniatic Haze
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