Martin Riker

Interesting Take on the Ghost Story

Martin Riker, an English professor at Washington University, St. Louis by day, wraps up a smorgasbord of ideas and observations, from television and society to a tautological philosophy of being iterated again and again, as is the situation Samuel Johnson’s ghost finds itself in transferring from one living person to another. This might have been a pretty dull affair if Samuel Johnson wasn’t such an arresting narrator, always in pursuit of the young son show more from whom he was torn by murder, failing at this time and again, resorting to reforming lives he rides around in, again thwarted, but never lacking for ways to express his frustrations, always ready to advance his knowledge, and forever making keen observations about life, death, and television. While his experience is the same pretty much each time he transfers to a new life, there’s enough movement forward and character development to keep you traveling along with him, as well as the aforementioned tautology wrapped up in the essence of Samuel Johnson the ghost.

Samuel Johnson, to briefly relate the plot, grows up in a small religious community in Pennsylvania, leaving young Samuel cut off from midcentury America, when the tale begins. Then a burly man from an even stricter religious community brings a television to the community. Allowed to put it in a small cottage, he invites Samuel, and later young Emily, to watch it with him. Samuel and Emily fall in love and marry. The TV man disappears (to reappear much later). The pair have a baby they name Samuel. Unfortunately, Emily dies in childbirth. Samuel raises his son, until one day a stranger snatches little Samuel and father Samuel dies trying to rescue his son. (Hang on readers of the novel, because there’s a twist awaiting you down the line about this.) After, Samuel finds himself in the mind of the killer, and then in the mind of the nearest person when the killer dies. And on and on it goes. Samuel cannot communicate while sharing the mind he is in. Nor can he control the other’s body, unless the other relinquishes control. But he can observe and, most of all, he can and does mightily recount his situation over and over again, and his objective, finding his son.

In some ways, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is like being locked in a room with nothing much to do but contemplate your life and the outside world you’re missing. But how that is done is the key, and Samuel Johnson does it very entertainingly. He’s a character you’ll enjoy hearing as he rambles on about this and that. And many of his ramblings can be insightful. For example, he finds early television (remember, three networks, four if you count defunct DuMont and later PBS) something that unifies people, rather than isolates them, which was the usual criticism of the day. That’s because it provided an entire nation with shared experiences. It’s much later, in current time, that Samuel observes TV and all media as dividing people, scattering them into their own confirmation bias cells.

This is to say that there is more than enough here to keep most readers happily in the company of Samuel Johnson for several hours. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Interesting Take on the Ghost Story

Martin Riker, an English professor at Washington University, St. Louis by day, wraps up a smorgasbord of ideas and observations, from television and society to a tautological philosophy of being iterated again and again, as is the situation Samuel Johnson’s ghost finds itself in transferring from one living person to another. This might have been a pretty dull affair if Samuel Johnson wasn’t such an arresting narrator, always in pursuit of the young son show more from whom he was torn by murder, failing at this time and again, resorting to reforming lives he rides around in, again thwarted, but never lacking for ways to express his frustrations, always ready to advance his knowledge, and forever making keen observations about life, death, and television. While his experience is the same pretty much each time he transfers to a new life, there’s enough movement forward and character development to keep you traveling along with him, as well as the aforementioned tautology wrapped up in the essence of Samuel Johnson the ghost.

Samuel Johnson, to briefly relate the plot, grows up in a small religious community in Pennsylvania, leaving young Samuel cut off from midcentury America, when the tale begins. Then a burly man from an even stricter religious community brings a television to the community. Allowed to put it in a small cottage, he invites Samuel, and later young Emily, to watch it with him. Samuel and Emily fall in love and marry. The TV man disappears (to reappear much later). The pair have a baby they name Samuel. Unfortunately, Emily dies in childbirth. Samuel raises his son, until one day a stranger snatches little Samuel and father Samuel dies trying to rescue his son. (Hang on readers of the novel, because there’s a twist awaiting you down the line about this.) After, Samuel finds himself in the mind of the killer, and then in the mind of the nearest person when the killer dies. And on and on it goes. Samuel cannot communicate while sharing the mind he is in. Nor can he control the other’s body, unless the other relinquishes control. But he can observe and, most of all, he can and does mightily recount his situation over and over again, and his objective, finding his son.

In some ways, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is like being locked in a room with nothing much to do but contemplate your life and the outside world you’re missing. But how that is done is the key, and Samuel Johnson does it very entertainingly. He’s a character you’ll enjoy hearing as he rambles on about this and that. And many of his ramblings can be insightful. For example, he finds early television (remember, three networks, four if you count defunct DuMont and later PBS) something that unifies people, rather than isolates them, which was the usual criticism of the day. That’s because it provided an entire nation with shared experiences. It’s much later, in current time, that Samuel observes TV and all media as dividing people, scattering them into their own confirmation bias cells.

This is to say that there is more than enough here to keep most readers happily in the company of Samuel Johnson for several hours. show less

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 show more 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. show less