The Guest Lecture

An economics professor who has recently been denied tenure, Abigail lies in bed awake the night before she is scheduled to deliver a guest lecture on an essay by John Maynard Keynes, ostensibly using a memorization technique involving imagining the sections of her paper as rooms in her house. What results is Abigail’s nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness examination of her life and choices, her fraught relationship with academia, and a dialogue with Keynes himself, who alternately encourages, debates, and cajoles her as she moves through the “rooms.” Her waking ruminations evolve into a dream state that will be familiar to anyone who has recurring anxiety dreams. In this welcome addition to the academic-novel genre, highly relatable to those suffering from imposter syndrome, Riker (Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return) 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.