Julie Schumacher (novelist and University of Minnesota English department faculty member) has crafted Dear Committee Members as a series of letters of recommendation from curmudgeonly Jason Fitger, tenured professor of Creative Writing and English at the fictional Payne University. Amid the defunding of his English department and shrinking remodel of its offices, Fitger's modest academic life is one of divorce, disappointment and disgruntlement. But he takes seriously his responsibility to support his students and agrees to all requests to send letters of recommendation, no matter how far-fetched the employment opportunity. His often rambling letters not only display his caustic distaste for university administrative bureaucracy, with its "endless requests for redundant documentation," but also cumulatively paint a picture of a once-optimistic graduate student who has lost his wife, his literary agent and his self-respect.
Fitger saves his most sincere recommendation letters for Darren Browles, a talented student trying to finish his "powerhouse" novel reinterpreting Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." As Darren is rejected for job after job, Fitger steadfastly sends out more and more letters on the young man's behalf. Gradually, Schumacher peels aside Fitger's tough façade to show a man who still believes in the power of literature and the role of teaching. He is perhaps most genuine in one letter where he describes his student as "not yet a candle ready to illuminate anyone else's darkness, but he understands that darkness exists, and he does not turn away." Can we ask anything more than this from a college education that still holds on to the study of literature and hasn't slipped finally and irrevocably into vocational practicality? --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.