The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker

Published by Grove Press/Black Cat on January 24, 2023

The narrator of The Guest Lecture makes occasional but increasingly unsuccessful attempts to impose structure upon a stream of consciousness ramble. The result is insightful and delightful.

Abigail was on a tenure track in the field of economics, dutifully publishing once a year in Tier 2 journals. She became sidetracked as she thought about an essay Keynes wrote called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Although the essay purported to make predictions about future economic growth, Abigail saw it as making deeper and more wide-ranging connections between economics, rhetoric, and optimism. She wrote a “messy little heartfelt essay” on those themes that went modestly viral, leading to an invitation to write a book that explored the same vague thesis. The book was published to little acclaim.

Abigail was then denied tenure on the pretense that her work was derivative because another economist had discussed similar subjects, although not through the lens of Keynes. Abigail was not familiar with the economist’s work and while her own book was no more derivative than nearly all scholarship (very few journal articles represent original thinking), she believes “a grumbling line of bitter visages” voted against tenure because they had “a vexed relationship with novelty, always preferring to re-tread existing critical paths rather than blaze new ones.”

Abigail has a dim view of academic economists, a group of consisting mostly of males who are fixated on mathematics and measurement but never wonder about what gets measured and what (or who) gets left out. She has a similar view of academic philosophers, noting that Plato believed philosophers alone would understand “essential truths,” proving that Plato “never met anyone from our philosophy department.”

While contemplating unemployment, Abigail is invited to give a lecture based on her book. She plans to compare “the two Keyneses: the creative improvisational human he was in life and the institutional symbol of unchecked governmental expenditures that history has made of him.” She wants to focus on Keynes’ view of optimism, but as she builds her planned lecture in her mind, it is anything but focused. When she tries to follow the old memory trick of imagining each section of the speech as a room in her house, Keynes joins her for a stroll through the rooms.

The novel consists largely of Abigail’s lecture, or her thought digressions as she tries to construct it. Keynes helpfully scolds her when she’s straying too far off track although, by the end, there’s no track to follow. The initial rooms of the house in Abigail’s mind are filled with interesting ideas: her disagreement with Keynes’ notion that everyone shares the same desire for leisure rather than work; optimism as a form of antagonism and thinking as a model for living; rhetoric and Sophists; Plato’s elitism; the debate about pragmatism in the Western intellectual tradition (whether it is better to be right or to be useful); resistance to feminism in economics.

Whoa, Keynes warns, you don’t have enough time to cover all this ground. But Abigail doesn’t care because she is having too much fun: “I am enjoying myself thinking about all of this: the history of rhetoric, the history of ideas.” The novel is, at its best, a celebration of ideas, of deep thought, of living a life of the mind.

But it is also a condemnation of living that life. As Abigail applies her ideas to her own life, she wonders how she came to her present (soon to be jobless) state. She faults herself for relying on instinct to carry her along with “a total absence of strategy.” She admires Keynes for following truths to reasoned conclusions, for his willingness to change his mind in response to new evidence, and wonders about her own aversion to risk. Or did risky decisions, none of which were well considered, result in the denial of tenure?

Where has a life of the mind gotten Abigail? Eventually, Abigail’s thoughts digress to her childhood, her failure to make friends in high school, the satisfaction she received from meeting smart people in college, the one meaningful friendship in college that faded away after graduation, her marriage and daughter. Abigail loves her husband but wonders whether he is, as a stay-at-home dad who stands upon his refusal to sell out to corporate America, taking advantage of her willingness to work so that he can pursue the kind of freedom from labor that Keynes assumes we all want.

Nothing recognizable as a plot emerges from The Guest Lecture. That’s fine. Through humor, sometimes biting and other times wistful, the novel tells a lively story — the story of ideas. The attempt to personalize that story through Abigail is probably necessary (a book about ideas wouldn’t be a novel without a character) but the story of ideas is stronger than the story of Abigail, whose self-doubt and resentments become a bit whiny before she realizes that nobody really fits into the world, that few people can (like Keynes) live a life of the mind and still make a difference.

The novel's ending invites the reader to wonder whether the guest lecture is even a thing. Abigail has been thrown off her game by the tenure committee and might need to plan a speech to gain clarity of thought and purpose. It is at least clear that Abigail is making a valiant effort to balance intellect and anxiety. She’s a likable mess who, the reader can confidently assume, is closer than she thinks to getting her life together — assuming that's an achievable goal for anyone.

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