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zachlittrell 's review for:
Dear Committee Members
by Julie Schumacher
I've always wanted to read a year-worth of letters from an asshole professor, and here it is, I guess.
I liked the idea of a book entirely of letters of recommendation, but by page 100, I was pretty darn bored. Professor Fitger is a prick in a dying English department (and yeah, it's fairly true to life for anyone who's spent any time at a college). If you like the humor, that's fine, but his overblown verbal ripostes missed more than they hit the mark for me. By the umpteenth letter where he gives lukewarm praise to forgettable students, slobbers for some attention from an ex, or attacks some campus enemy over something petty, it's pretty obvious Fitger is an occasionally well-intentioned sad-sack, and it's easy to see why his ex-wife limits their dinners together to just twice a year.
The shtick of the book is stretched just about as far as it can go, and ain't half as clever as you'd hope. It's really dependent on Fitger's tendency to overshare on entirely unrelated topics ("I'm writing to recommend my former stude--by the way, this professor is pissing in bottles!"). BUT, it still made me chuckle occasionally.
And one letter in particular really stuck out to me: the letter for Tara Tappani, whom he caught plagiarizing red-handed, failed, and yet she took it all in her carefree stride.
Maybe I'd just rather read the story of the unflappable Tara Tappani, with a brief cameo by world-weary professor Jay Fitger, rather than the other way around.
I liked the idea of a book entirely of letters of recommendation, but by page 100, I was pretty darn bored. Professor Fitger is a prick in a dying English department (and yeah, it's fairly true to life for anyone who's spent any time at a college). If you like the humor, that's fine, but his overblown verbal ripostes missed more than they hit the mark for me. By the umpteenth letter where he gives lukewarm praise to forgettable students, slobbers for some attention from an ex, or attacks some campus enemy over something petty, it's pretty obvious Fitger is an occasionally well-intentioned sad-sack, and it's easy to see why his ex-wife limits their dinners together to just twice a year.
The shtick of the book is stretched just about as far as it can go, and ain't half as clever as you'd hope. It's really dependent on Fitger's tendency to overshare on entirely unrelated topics ("I'm writing to recommend my former stude--by the way, this professor is pissing in bottles!"). BUT, it still made me chuckle occasionally.
And one letter in particular really stuck out to me: the letter for Tara Tappani, whom he caught plagiarizing red-handed, failed, and yet she took it all in her carefree stride.
I reminded Ms. Tappani that, a year ago, I gave her a well-deserved F in my Intermediate Fiction class. She chuckled and put a manicured little paw on my forearm, as if the two of us were sharing a wonderful joke. "Don't worry about that," she assured me. "I just need a letter."
Maybe I'd just rather read the story of the unflappable Tara Tappani, with a brief cameo by world-weary professor Jay Fitger, rather than the other way around.