One of my favourite bookseller tasks is recommending books. It’s so cool to enthusiastically share thoughts on ace reads. Of course often people aren’t looking for something that chimes with my tastes, but that’s ok too. I pride myself on being able to match folk with the right books. The thing I find the hardest is when someone asks for a funny read. Humour is subjective and I am often unamused by things people appear to find hilarious. Most of the novels I read are not exactly happy and a request for a light, enjoyable read can stump me when it comes to thinking of something I have genuinely enjoyed. My oft favoured approach is, “This is very popular and is meant to be funny.”
“Dear Committee Members” actually had me laughing out loud, although, somewhat typically of things I admire, there is a darkness too. It’s an epistolary novel (which I’m not that fond of usually) composed entirely of letters of recommendation written by Jason Fitger, a jaded professor of creative writing at a small college in midwest America. His own novels have not brought him the success he once seemed likely to have, his marriage has failed, and he is languishing at the bottom of the college hierarchy. Nonetheless, colleagues and students endlessly request letters of recommendation from him and he turns these into a truly hilarious and bitter art-form.
“My colleague Franklin Kentrell has asked me to recommend him for a Galloway Foundation research and Travel Award. I would have quickly refused with a clear conscience except that Kentrell penned a Galloway recommendation for me a dozen years ago (I did not receive the award), and in his oily, sidewinding way, he trapped me in the corridor this morning, clutched the lapel of my jacket with his untrimmed nails, and suggested that “tit for tat was only fair.”
Kentrell will never survive round #1 in your deliberations; therefore, secure in the knowledge that this letter will soon join thousands of its brethren in a rolling bin destined for recycling— presumably before it is read—I am comfortable endorsing this application.”
His attempts to help his favourite student, a troubled and broke young man, and repair relations with his exes, add poignancy to the fun, and what at first seems a light read becomes something rather more.
(Thanks to Scott Pack for sending me a copy of this.)
Sara Crowley 