The Guest Lecture

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

By Martin Riker; Black Cat, 256 pages, $17