You know those nights when you can’t sleep, so you’re lying in bed with your brain whirling, and every bad, stupid, embarassing thing you ever did in your life comes unbidden to replay in your head, and you come to question all your life choices? I call those my dark nights of the soul. This book is the entire inner monologue of an economics professor during one such dark night of the soul. Because she’s an economics professor, we hear a lot about John Maynard Keynes along with the questioning of all her life choices. It was rather comforting to learn that my inner monologue isn’t all that unusual, but it also wasn’t the best, or most interesting, or most convincing method for conveying the ideas I think the author wanted to convey. ( )

One of the more unique books I've ever read. The premise is that an economist is practicing giving a speech on Keynesian Economics and John Maynard Keynes. She is doing so while in the throes of insomnia.

The book is essentially one long stream of consciousness where the protagonist spirals between practicing the speech, talking to her subconscious, digging up and working through painful memories, and walking through her house (as a memory device to remember her speech).

It is a beautiful human book, and one I enjoyed far more than I expected. ( )

This is the story of a lady economics professor who is denied tenure and trying to come to terms with this. She has been chosen to make a speech based in part on the writings of John Maynard Keynes though he has been dead for many years becomes a vision taking an active part is her life as a whole. She is married with a small daughter who plays little part in the novel. The book is pretty dry with to many one and two page paragraphs. ( )

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker is a short but dense book that looks at several of life's problems through the lens of a woman about to give a lecture right after receiving bad news.

We basically accompany the protagonist as she lies awake in bed trying to organize the lecture she is about to give by using her house as a memory device. With the help, sorta, of Keynes she looks at the things that have gone wrong, and what the future might hold for her family. The use of Keynes helps to link the personal with the public, the small picture with the larger societal picture.

This book will appeal to readers who are content to have less action and more contemplation. Which means those who don't like it will probably really not like it. That said, ignore any so-called economist who asks, in a dismissive manner, just what is feminist economics. Thirty years as an educator and he has never heard of a field that has had its own major journal since the mid-90s. But then again he is no doubt more focused on his non-academic financial group than with knowing his field more widely. Dismiss his misogyny the way he dismisses the woman in the novel, he is just the typical "help the haves get more" idiot.

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book widely, I would highly recommend it to those I do. I'm just not sure how wide the readership will be.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

Abigail has just received about the worst news possible for any junior professor: she will not be granted tenure at her current university. As the only female member of the Economics Department, she now faces the unenviable prospect of finding a new job at a vastly inferior college so that she can continue to support her husband Ed, himself an adjunct faculty member, and Ali, her young daughter. To make matters worse, she is presently struggling to focus on a lecture she has committed to give the next morning on Pragmatic Optimism in the writings of legendary economist John Maynard Keynes. As she lies awake with her troubled thoughts, she conjures up Keynes’ image to serve as a spiritual guide and sounding board to help her prepare for the seminar she now views as crucial to her professional future.

That is the basic premise of The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker’s novel of philosophical musings, linguistic discourse, and one woman’s confrontation with her own shortcomings. I would love to report that I found the book to be both charming and intellectually engaging, but, sadly, it turned out to be neither of those things. Instead, the prose was more pretentious than illuminating, with frequent and seemingly gratuitous references to such topics as ancient Greek elocution techniques, outmoded economic theories, misguided indictments of how educational institutions function, the role of rhetoric in academic research, and so on. The result of the author trying to do way too much—and with too much showing off—was a story that became increasingly muddled and unfocused as Abby and Keynes worked through her litany of issues during the long and tortured night. And the lack of resolution in the ending was, to say the least, quite unsatisfying.

Perhaps the real problem with the novel was Abby, who was a genuinely unlikeable character. Labeled a “feminist economist” (whatever that is supposed to mean), she blamed everyone but herself—e.g., the person who hired her, her older male colleagues, her husband—for her failure to produce a significant enough scholarly record to merit promotion. Further, when her vanity book project was revealed to be highly derivative of someone else’s work published thirty years earlier, she lamented that no one in the profession had made her aware of that fact. As someone who has survived more than three decades as an academic economist, trust me when I say that Abby truly deserved the outcome she got, irrespective of the gender card she plays at every chance. If there are people in the story worth feeling sorry for it would be Ed and Ali, or even J. M. Keynes, who I suspect was not asked if he wanted to be part of all this. Unfortunately, this is not a book that I can recommend. ( )