Dear Committee Members,
I am writing to you today to recommend this book by Julie Schumacher. It is a book of letters, written from a beleaguered college literature and writing professor at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. Jason Fitger is his name, and his twenty years of service to the college do not preclude him from losing his promising writing career as well as his wife due to his bad habit of using his novels to air his personal laundry.
His letters throughout the year become increasingly pointed and passive aggressive, as his department gets cuts to both budget and office space. But all this time, he keeps writing his letters. He writes to the school, to beg for moments of peace from the construction of the new economics wing of the building. He writes letters of recommendation for students who are moving on to new jobs or educational opportunities. He writes to his old friends, whose writing careers are far more successful, for help getting his favorite student's novel finished and published.
As Fitger's life gets more and more frustrating, his letters get more and more frustrated. He lets loose little by little in his letters for his students, as he recommends them for internships, master's programs, and jobs for a future that he sees as his own, diminishing a little more every day.
While a lesser writer would turn this into a maudlin missive, Julie Schumacher turned Dear Committee Members into a comic masterpiece. With a long list of literary honors for this, including being the first woman ever to win the Thurber Prize for Humor Writing, Schumacher and her novel made a splash that few comic novels achieve.
I can't recommend this book enough. Fun and honest, smart and solid, it's required reading.
Ever your book-addicted blogger,
Jill