num_pages: 256
description: With a voice as clear sincere and wry as any Ive read in current American fiction (Joshua Cohen) Martin Rikers poignant and startlingly original novel asks how to foster a brave mind in anxious times following a newly jobless academic rehearsing a speech on John Maynard Keynes for a surprising audienceIn a hotel room in the middle of the night Abby a young feminist economist lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on trackKeynes himself.Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history utopia and Keyness pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness Abby undertakes a heros quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her minda piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifahas she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations.With warm intellect playful curiosity and an infectious voice Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one womans midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.
language: English
title: The Guest Lecture
publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat