Failing academic tries to retain her optimism
Martin Riker’s novel “The Guest Lecture” begins when a faltering academic conjures up an imaginary phantasm of the early-20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes. Abigail is on the eve of delivering a lecture on him as a utopian poet of deliberate optimism. She desperately needs a mnemonic to memorize all her points, but Keynes is no help. “You were born into an era of overload,” he tells her. “Leaving things out is the great unmastered art form of your age.”
If only it were so easy. Abigail has a busy brain focused on her failures: Her colleagues denied her application for tenure, her book published to crickets, and she probably must sell her beloved house and move her family. There’s no overflow of hope in Abigail’s heart, no rosy future in her head. And the subject of her guest lecture – humanist economics and the hopeful spirit – feels increasingly painful to present.
Her preparation for this lecture, which carries almost the whole novel, is the mesmerizing rehearsal for a swan song. Abigail attempts to reclaim her optimism, both as attitude and philosophy. To do so, she grasps for stories from her past, from other thinkers, from past loves, most of which she divulges to Keynes.
“The Guest Lecture” is a novel of ideas and feelings, of feelings about ideas and ideas about feelings. If this lecture will be her final word on her subject, Abigail naturally wants to express everything. Living in “an era of overload” can feel like a rush, and the book doesn’t deny us that. It bursts with philosophy, jokes, factoids, tense academic social dynamics and fragments of formative memory. Keynes is a snappish but patient listener.
“The Guest Lecture” dissects the mourning both of an intellectual career and of a way of thinking that has been lost. Abigail reminds us that Keynes – father of macroeconomics, who’s misquoted as frequently as he’s misunderstood –
“was before all else a humanist, an old-school liberal pragmatist.” He “condemned the love of money for its own sake as a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” In this spirit, the protagonist recounts discovering a love of economics, only when she encounters a more humanistic approach that reworks the standard methodology. “Economies are made up of more than just men; economics is made up of more than just math,” she recalls. “A more inclusive picture. Inclusivity is simply accuracy.”
Abigail has devoted her career to reviving Keynes’s essential humanism. “When Keynes came to it, economics was still a branch of moral philosophy,” Abigail says. “The author [Adam Smith] of The Wealth of Nations had also written The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Moral sentiments! Would that more of my own colleagues took up the study of those.” But, just as many of Keynes’ moral and humanistic principles were shuffled out of economics as a practice, our protagonist was elbowed out of her academic career. Riker makes a credible critique of academia’s priorities when it becomes clear how much Abigail loves teaching and how much her students love her. Of course, her extra work mentoring was entirely irrelevant to the tenure committee.
One of Keynes’ key predictions – that jobs might one day be obsolete – has a particular cruelty for Abigail in this moment. She wants her job, and she needs it; employment precarity abounds. The prep for the lecture is a reckoning about her priorities. She worries that her intellectual optimism doomed her career.
“The Guest Lecture” analyzes how people live with their ideas, particularly when the world tells them those ideas are misguided. Defending personal philosophy in the face of rejection is always difficult, especially when the personal philosophy is optimism. A breathless, nightbefore-the-big-day cram feels like an ideal form for this expression. The book carries the exhaustive feeling that it’s captured everything the protagonist wanted to say. It doesn’t attempt the great unmastered art form of the age, to leave things out. A last hurrah shouldn’t skip any final word.
Hanging out has never seemed quite so important as it has since the pandemic began. Sudden, forced isolation gave way to simultaneously jubilant and tepid communion. Now that people have settled further into old routines, it is, perhaps, a good time to focus on building better ones. That is the ostensible purpose of “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time” by Sheila Liming.
Liming’s self-proclaimed manifesto opens with a simple and expansive account of what hanging out is, the better to help us understand why it matters: “Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company of others. ... It’s about blocking out time and dedicating it to the work of interacting with other people, whoever they might be.” Her stated goal in “Hanging Out” is to examine “how such a simple act became so incredibly hard for many of us, and what might be done to dismantle some of the pressures and obstacles that persist in making it that way.”
With that in mind, what follows is perplexing. “Hanging Out” contains neither evidence that hanging out has become incredibly hard nor suggestions for how to realistically change the circumstances that might make it difficult. Instead, Liming dedicates much of the book to stories from her past. She has lived an interesting life, and she tells these stories well.
Perhaps the most interesting example details her time appearing in the background of “Girl Meets Farm,” a Food Network show starring her friend Molly Yeh. The filming schedule required a doubling of holidays: one real celebration and one for the show. This process sucked the meaning and joy out of the made-for-TV gatherings. “It’s the Super Bowl! (It’s October.) It’s Hanukkah! (It’s April.) It’s a baby! (Again – we did this last weekend.)” The absurdity of it, the way it would distort your world, is palpable. So, too, is the pain this arrangement ultimately caused. Reflecting on her role in Yeh’s life, Liming “arrived at the realization that she needed me to help her construct a semblance of fun” more than to be a friend.
Paradoxically, these unique experiences are a massive hindrance for the book. Liming is an expert on the costs of appearing on a reality show, but that has limited utility in a chapter that aspires to analyze the way reality television has kept its viewers from hanging out. As she builds her argument, it begins to seem like she has never watched a reality show, and indeed she acknowledges that she’s never watched “Girl Meets Farm,” the only program that she discusses in any detail. In lieu of examining actual shows or viewers, she primarily references Mark Greif’s 2005 essay “The Reality of Reality Television.” It’s a good essay that would have made a fine foundation for Liming had she published this book a decade or more ago. However, the landscape of reality TV and how viewers relate to it has drastically transformed in the intervening years, and Liming appears to understand none of it. Even if it hadn’t, Liming’s sweeping claims about what reality TV does – “conjures situations that look and feel familiar” and “masks an essential uncanniness through its repeated attempts to make everything feel homely and essentially tame” – wouldn’t have stood up in 2005.
This disconnect is palpable in the chapter’s conclusion, where she reaches for hyperbolic caricature: “We beg TV to beam those places and people into the enclosures where we live now so we can have someone to talk to and hang out with.” The first-person plural is an odd fit; Liming has already separated herself from reality viewers. The chapter offers no evidence – whether from her experience or that of others – that makes this picture of lonely and desperate masses believable. There certainly is reason to believe that reality TV fosters antisocial behavior. The hosts and stars of the “Bachelor” franchise, for example, are constantly admonishing its fans for poor online behavior – while simultaneously fostering it and profiting off it. On the other hand, there is also a robust watch-party culture where people use the show as an excuse to hang out. Writing about this would have required some knowledge or research about what watching reality TV entails today. Liming confines herself to the experience of appearing on it.
“Hanging Out” is unconvincing in other ways, too. Take “Jamming as Hanging Out,” Liming’s chapter about her time playing music in Pittsburgh. At one point, she argues that jamming “resists commodification in existing for its own ends.” But several pages earlier, she insists that jamming was an essential part of preparing for a concert: “Without that preparatory, exploratory work, the stuff we did onstage, into microphones, was fated to falter.”
Throughout “Hanging Out,” Liming often fails to really engage with the ways others hang out, even as she claims that the activity itself requires “listening but also assiduous digestion.” In “Hanging Out on the Internet,” she thrice asserts that her students prefer hanging out online to hanging out in person before conceding that, actually, this may be an “apparent preference.” If she were unclear about their preference, one wonders why she didn’t simply ask them.
But anyone who skimmed the chapter would have difficulty believing that it even appeared that way. She shares a few of her students’ opinions about hanging out online during pandemic-enforced isolation, and they describe feeling profoundly alienated. One of them recalls taking thousands of selfies to remind herself that she was still somewhere. Another describes her virtual Thanksgiving and how grateful she was to have had a small respite from the isolation. Liming zeroes in on the student’s fond description of looking back at smiling screenshots as proof, it seems, that this is what the student prefers. But the choice wasn’t between being online and being in-person. It was between being online and being alone. Assiduous digestion might have made that clear.
“Hanging Out” is a partially successful memoir that mostly fails as a manifesto. When I reached the conclusion, where Liming offers her prescriptions – take time, take risks, take (and create) opportunities, take care and take heart – the book’s introduction seemed almost like a dream. “Like all manifestos,” Liming writes there, “this one brims with utopian urges and visions.” That sounds interesting. I wish that were true.