By Julie Schumacher (180 pages)
Published by Doubleday
Bookish rating: 4
First, let me say that this book reinforces my view that academics are the WHINIEST bunch of folks in the world, after toddlers. I mean, I get their disillusionment to a point: they toil and study and get degrees and become experts, harboring a vision of striding across a Cambridge-esque campus, revered as the scholars they view themselves as.
Of course, colleges and universities paying little and hiring too many adjuncts, not to mention the unpreparedness of millions of students who can barely formulate sentences, let alone original thoughts---well, it's small wonder academics feel a bit pissed.
This epistolary novel, written in letters by a ticked off lit ad creative writing professor, Jason Fitger, is snark perfected. He's insanely jealous of the Economics department, feeling obsolete and failure-like, and prickly. Prickly, prickly, prickly. The novel is hilarious. Brilliantly so. But it also contains an undercurrent of Jason actually giving a hoot about his students.
Oh, academia. I shall never manage to really pity those who have made careers in fields they adore, or have professed to adore. Oh, sure, it must be soul-killing to have a doctorate in English only to teach remedial writing 101 on the basics of what makes a thesis statement, or why a complete sentence requires both a subject AND a verb. But what redeems Jason Fitger is that he actually does care. Very much, despite claiming WTF and alienating himself from everyone in his effort to be an asshole. Recommended.
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