Dear Committee Members: A Novel (8 page)

You or any other employer will be very fortunate to hire a person such as Ms. Cuddigan, who may one day rise to leadership in your organization, at which point I trust it will adopt a more reasonable spelling. In the meantime, I hope you will not consign her to a windowless environment populated entirely by unsocialized clones who long ago abandoned the reading and discussion of literature in favor of creating ever more restrictive and meaningless ways in which humans are intended to make themselves known to one another.

Keeping the torch aloft, I remain Jay Fitger

Professor of Creative Writing and English Author (i.e., books)

January 21, 2010

Janet Matthias-
Fitger

Law School Admissions

17 Pitlinger Hall

Janet:

Sending this in haste and perturbation, and hoping this letter finds you cheerfully disposed toward your onetime spouse … I have a graduate student, I believe I told you about him—his name is Browles and he needs a job that will cover his spring tuition. I had hoped to tuck him away for a productive month or two at Bentham, but Eleanor slammed the door in his face, then compounded the insult by offering a
six-month
residency to one of his classmates, a tepid memoir writer named Vivian Zelles. (Please tell me you haven’t corresponded with Eleanor about this; have you?)

I appeal not to your long-lost affection for me but your sense of fairness: your law school professors are sitting on tuffets of money over there in Pitlinger, what with old attorneys dying and, graveside, signing over their estates to ensure that every lowly assistant professor gets a research account and a stack of gold bars; here in Willard, on the other hand, the penurious and despondent—with Browles as exemplar—are shuffling back and forth on a stage set from the end of the world.

Janet: Did you know that Madelyne TV died? I just had a letter returned to me from her office, stamped
DECEASED
. I saw her ten or twelve years ago at a conference in Denver and she looked just the same: that crop of wild hair, the fingers happily cluttered with thick silver rings. I remember her twirling those rings around her fingers at the Seminar table while we waited for HRH’s pronouncements, our collective anxiety manifesting itself in the revolutions of those silver bands. It’s impossible to think of someone as sparkling as Madelyne ailing and dying; at least she made a valuable life outside academia: working with PTSD sufferers must have been a relief, a step in the direction of clearheaded sanity. Poor sweet lovely TV.

Perhaps your ex-wifely radar has discerned my fatigue. Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I’m living the life of a fruit fly—the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a “fresh start” that leads to the same moribund conclusions. I suppose MTV’s death has hit me hard—and with Troy reappearing (I wish I knew how to help him) and Eleanor wielding the guillotine at Bentham … Well, the timing stings.

In regard to funding for Browles—there’s more at stake in this case than support for one student. If he can finish this accursed book and sell it, I can use his success to argue for the continuance—or reinstatement—of our graduate program. Unfortunately, Browles doesn’t look the part of the poster
child: he can be maddeningly inert, and I just found out that, entirely disregarding my advice, he allowed his registration to lapse. Still, should funding arrive in the guise of a law professor requiring a graduate assistant, I’m sure Carole will manage the reregistration. (After a setback involving an artichoke salad, she’s agreed to speak to me again on a limited basis—but only at work between the hours of one-thirty and four.) In case you’re worried that, as my protégé, Browles might be writing a novel about Payne or about recognizable people on campus—I assure you, he has better material. Find him a job and he’ll work his butt off, and I’ll maintain a grateful but dignified distance so that no one in Pitlinger will associate your orotund ex-husband with the new RA.

With the usual regrets and reminiscences,

J

P.S.: Our annual lunch on February 3 at Cava, yes? I’m finished with class at 12:30 …

January 25, 2010

Gropp’s Liquor Lounge and Winemart “35 Years of High Spirits”

Dan Stimmson, Proprietor

609 Faygre Avenue

Saint Paul, MN 55101

Dear Mr. Stimmson,

This letter recommends to you my student, Steve Geng, who has applied to Gropp’s Liquor Lounge and Winemart in the pursuit of a part-time position. Mr. Geng is a senior here at the university, an English/Spanish double major who finagled his way into an independent study (typically I manage to dodge such requests)—namely, the creation of a mini-anthology of short hallucinatory narratives, each of which begins with a young male speaker (coincidentally named Steve Geng) who has ingested a controlled substance. I believe narrative #1 relies on Adderall,
numero dos
on mushrooms, and #3 on gin.

Comely and articulate, Mr. Geng is prone to dreamy non sequiturs that have endeared him to his peers. I predict that young women will flock to your store in the hopes of hearing him decipher the labels on Chilean and Argentinean wine.

Salud!

Jay Fitger, Professor, Payne University

January 29, 2010

Ken Doyle, Hautman and Doyle Literary Agency

141 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

Dear Ken,

You must have heard by now the sad news about MTV: a heart attack, instantaneous—she was fifty-six. Janet and I will raise a glass in her memory at our “divorce anniversary” lunch next week; I wish MTV and I had kept more closely in touch.

In other unnerving Seminar alumni news I’ve heard from Troy: the poor bastard is back in the U.S. after a decade in India and is scouring the private sector for jobs. The letter I got from him was short and cryptic; it made me envision him living in a canvas tent and washing his underwear in a stream. His only address seems to be a P.O. box. I didn’t tell him about MTV, being loath to notify a person with Troy’s history about anyone’s demise … Has he written to you? The idea of a writer with Troy’s luminous gifts selling widgets—I find it painful. My intuition tells me he wouldn’t have reestablished contact unless he was writing. Put that in your agent’s pipe and smoke it.

Which reminds me: the purpose of this letter is actually to recommend to you a student, Vivian Zelles, who read something favorable about you in
Publishers Weekly
and, having learned
that you and I were Seminar friends, has waged an implacable daily campaign in my office, insisting that I query you about her work. Zelles is a comparative literature student currently finishing a coming-of-age story purportedly narrated by the first genetically engineered human-feline cross (specifically, a human/cheetah). She began the novel as a memoir, writing about growing up in an immigrant family in California. I found the project to be a bit quiet (that is, dull), which may have led to the manuscript’s current confabulation—a pseudo autobiography in which the speaker portrays herself as a fifteen-year-old girl/cheetah amalgam. Ms. Zelles informs me that the human/animal blend mirrors the false distinction between fiction and fact and points to the necessity of the hybrid form. Whatever the hell she wants to call it—a mem-vel, a novoir—the new incarnation of the book is effectively startling, especially the scene in which the protagonist devours and then remorsefully regurgitates her little brother. It’s possible, I suppose, that an independent publisher (how many are left, still clinging to their ragged life rafts?) might be intrigued by the project. To that end, the indefatigable Ms. Zelles will be sending, under separate cover next week, an excerpt. See what you think.

Meanwhile I gather—twelve weeks on—you’re still mulling Browles’s sample? Eleanor spurned him at Bentham (twisting the knife in the wound by admitting Ms. Zelles), after which I asked Janet to arrange for some money to be funneled toward
Browles via an RAship at the law school, but to no avail. Ken—take his sample out of the fucking envelope and read it. Browles doesn’t need a big advance; he needs an editor with a functional brain and some vision. (And please refrain from selling the book to the narcoleptics who published
Save Me for Later:
Georgianne is barely sentient, and Simon has forgotten, it seems, how to answer his phone.)

And of course, let me know if you have any interest in Vivian Zelles, whose tabby-infused concoction will cross your desk soon.

Eager, as always, to hear from you,

Jay

P.S.: I need to lodge a belated complaint against the poet—Randolph Marlin—whom I invited to campus in December on your say-so; he was even more of an egomaniac than I expected. Where do poets—with their readership in the low double figures—get off exhibiting that kind of flagrant self-regard? He quizzed the undergrads about his work and then faulted their answers. He wanted to know which of his poems they’d committed to memory. Good god: it was all I could do to restrain myself from saying that my own objective was to try to forget his wretched, soporific lines as completely as possible. I tried to get him drunk at the reception so as to humiliate him for the students’ benefit (believe me, they would have been
grateful), but he poured four or five glasses of expensive scotch (my tab, of course) down his gullet as if emptying wash water into a drain.

Next time you hand-select a member of your menagerie for a campus visit, make sure she or he is housebroken.

February 2, 2010—Groundhog Day Addistar Network, Inc.

Bridget Maslow, HR

[email protected] Dear Ms. Maslow:

Though I prefer to send letters of recommendation via the U.S. Postal Service, now considered by many to be as quaint as muttonchop whiskers and the butter churn, I hereby accede to your request for an e-mail evaluation of Quentin Eshe, who has applied for the position of assistant communications coordinator at Addistar.

Mr. Eshe graduated this past December, a double major in English and phys ed. I can’t comment on the phys ed portion of his undergraduate career (what do they study over there? dodgeball?) except to note that Mr. Eshe appears to be physically fit and as tightly coiled as a spring.

As for his English studies: Mr. Eshe was my student in the American Literature Survey and in the Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop. He received a B– in the former (I believe he had appendicitis that semester) and an A– in the latter. His final project this past fall was a twenty-page autobiographical essay about his father who, one hopes, will not be permitted
to read even a paragraph of the completed work. It is painful and problematic to conclude that another human being—a stranger—does not deserve to be forgiven or loved, but that is the conclusion I drew about Mr. Eshe’s father. (His mother is deceased.) Such was the acuity and unflinching vividness of the portrait of the senior Mr. Eshe that I believe I could identify his snarling face in a police lineup.

Eshe is not jovial or loquacious and he won’t be the first in your office to set a tray of baked goods by the coffee machine. But by his own account he has survived a difficult if not harrowing childhood; and what skill matters more than the ability to prevail in the face of cruelty, adversity, neglect, and ill will? Furthermore, Mr. Eshe possesses powers of description that, in ways he does not yet recognize or understand, will be of great value to him and others throughout his life.

Given time, Eshe will blossom, and you will be very grateful to have hired him. But do not ask about his family—he has moved on.

Speaking the truth despite its drawbacks, I am Earnestly yours,

Jason Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University

P.S.: Belatedly it occurs to me that some members of your HR committee, a few skeptical souls, may be clutching a double
strand of worry beads and wondering aloud about the practicality or usefulness of a degree in English rather than, let’s say, computers. Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician—a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.

February 6, 2010

Portia Jameson, Manager Xanadu Park RV’s Timothy, MN 55359

Dear Ms. Jameson,

It has come to my attention that your RV park is in need of a (temporary) assistant manager, and I am writing to recommend to you a very mature and responsible individual, Darren Browles. Mr. Browles is soon to be widely known as a novelist, as he is currently putting the finishing touches on a book he has been writing for the past five years. I am sure it would reflect well on your RV park to have an employee—temporary or no—of this impressive stature.

Mr. Browles does not currently own an RV so would require housing while in Xanadu’s employ. I do not believe he has any pets and, as per your ad, he is a nonsmoker. Having known him relatively well for the past two years, I can attest to his work ethic, his cleanliness, and his honesty.

With best wishes and anticipating a prompt reply, I am Jason Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University
P.S.: Others may have pointed this out to you already but there is no need for an apostrophe in the title of your place of business. Apostrophes are not appropriate for simple plurals; they indicate possession (as in “Darren’s book”) or the omission of a letter (for example, the absent letter
i
in “Darren’s the person we want to hire at Xanadu”).

February 8, 2010

Camilla Mayhew

Chair, Department of English

DiCameron College

55 North Plane Street

Siderea, FL 32703

Dear Camilla,

It seems only a few short years ago that you were here in my office (yes, I am still snugly installed in the same bucolic location, next to the restrooms), asking for a letter of recommendation to assist in what you felt was an unlikely bid for graduate school; and now, post-PhD, with two solid books under your belt, you are already chairing a department. I had faith in you then, and I’m gratified to see that I wasn’t mistaken.