The Writing Class

I loved Jincy Willet’s hilarious second book about aging novelist and writing instructor Amy Gallup so much that I doubled back to read this first one. While this has the same main character and I enjoyed it a lot, The Writing Class is very different from its sequel and I liked the second book more. Amy Falls Down is absurd, funny, insightful, and moving, and while The Writing class has all of those qualities they aren’t as strong and it’s first and foremost a mystery--an element that is not part of the second book about Amy Gallup at all.

As a mystery, The Writing Class is a curious but interesting hybrid, part humorous cozy and part chilling psychological thriller. I have a low fear threshold so I may not be a good judge, but show more some sections of this book were the most chilling, scary reading I have done for a while. Guessing who the likely suspect was didn’t dissipate my unease at all--which greatly impresses me. Another very cool thing about this book is that Amy uses her skill as a writer and instructor of fiction to solve the crime. Both books featuring Amy Gallup would be great for wanna-be or beginning authors because a lot of discussion about the process of fiction writing is seamlessly integrated into the plot.

As a side note, Amy Gallup, fictional character, has a website with the off putting title GO AWAY which includes crazy lists, mash-up titles with crossbred plot descriptions, and links to nowhere. It turns out Jincy Willet, real life novelist, has a similarly eccentric website, I WOULD NOT BURN THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA FOR YOU, that’s worth checking out if you enjoy her writing.

http://www.jincywillett.com/journal/pick-a-lib/ show less

Delightfully self-aware! This was a really fun read, but not fluffy or too light. The premise is a community college writing class that becomes the setting/vehicle for a murder mystery. "Amy Gallup was a loner who was afraid to be alone." (12) She is also the teacher and mostly fearless leader for the Fiction class that meets Wednesday nights. We begin at the beginning with the first class and its students - introductions, intentions, etc. - a diverse group of 13 (!) with various reasons for taking the class. Amy is the primary focus and through the narrator we mostly get her story except where it intersects with the students. But the book opens with a malevolent point of view describing Amy from the outside. This same pov intrudes show more throughout, and begins to target others in the class as they are sharing critiques of their work and soon it turns physical with frightful pranks, email hacking and harassing phone calls (landline, 2009 before cell phones were so prevalent) It must be one of the students, but how to find out which one? The escalation of events leads the university to cancel the class and fire Amy but the devoted group of students continues to meet in homes, even though the threat and danger is evident. Amy, who peaked early in her own career as a writer and has had some personal tragedies that have blocked her creativity since (death of a spouse, divorce) is both freaked out and intrigued by the events unfolding. She really likes all the students, but she is such an introvert, she literally cannot be around them more often than the weekly class. As she tries to reason out who the so-called "Sniper" is, she has to confront some of her own biases and demons too. A sampling of the students: Dot Hieronymous who takes murder mystery cruises and has written a script for one; Tiffany, the pretty air-head looking feminist scholar, Ricky Buzza, reporter, Syl Reyes who is just there to meet chicks, Edna Wentworth, spinster retired schoolteacher, Dr. Richard Surtees, pompous jerk who is writing a novel, Carla, essentially a groupie who has taken numerous classes with Amy and is able to parrot her word for word, and a few others thrown in the mix. Honestly, that was the one downside for me - a few too many to keep track of! Lots of humor here with a great parody of the writer's workshop model, but authentic story-telling and a true mystery whose resolution I did not see coming. I really enjoyed this one! show less

A fast, fun read; an enjoyable mystery, wrapped in a writing class, inside a meditation on storytelling and the oft-times frustrated storytellers who tell them.

I read this after being (mostly) stood up for a first "date" with the members of my nascent writing group. I sat in the bookstore and ate carrot cake and plowed through this page-turner and thought to myself, ha ha, now I'm going to add all of you to the list of people I hope to spite with my writing, well, not you, Nathan, at least you managed to make it to the appropriate Starbucks at the previously-agreed-upon date and time; I'll spare you my spite, but don't cross me, Nathan.

Perhaps reading about murderous writers isn't the best thing for me right now.

This was a wonderful surprise. My sister had given it to me for Christmas-- one of those books I never would have picked up for myself-- and once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. Jincy Willett's portrayal of Amy, the aging, overweight, one-time-author who now teaches writing classes, and her ragtag bunch of students is full of humor and insight. And when a whodunnit is thrown into the mix (one of the members of the class is slowly killing off the other members), so much the better. As an added bonus, Willett knows her stuff about writing, and manages to slip in quite a bit of wisdom about the writing and publishing worlds. A very satisfying read.

If a member of your night class were murdering classmates, wouldn't you find something better to do those evenings? So would I, but thankfully the members of the writing class in Jincy Willett's "The Writing Class" keep coming back for more.

That's just one of the things about the novel that don't quite add up, but I don't think a realistic murder mystery was Willett's objective in her 2008 novel. It is more a satire on writing classes, literary aspirations and even murder mysteries themselves.

Amy Gallup is a novelist, or former novelist, whose books are out of print and whose literary career, like her personal life, lies in ruins. To support herself and her dog, she teaches a writing class for adults, most of whom have little or no show more talent but who pay the fees, so they're in. Just wanting to be a writer is good enough for Amy. That's more ambition than she has anymore.

Even early on it is clear some member of her new class has a screw loose. Ominous phone messages, notes, etc., keep appearing as the weeks go on. Then one class member is found dead, then another. The police don't take it seriously. (Since Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, police incompetence has been more rule than exception in murder mysteries.) Since her class refuses to disband (and she needs the money), Amy realizes it is up to her to find the Sniper, as the killer is dubbed.

"The Writing Class," sometimes interesting and sometimes not, doesn't earn an A, but it is good enough to make you glad you kept coming back for more. show less

The Writing Class by Jincy Willet is many things: intelligently-humorous, whip-smart, well-written, entertaining, engrossing, suspenseful, and scary – just to name a few!

This book will be a real treat for all fiction lovers, writers, and wannabe writers. The Writing Class manages to combine mystery/suspense elements with classic fiction elements making the end result a fast-paced thriller for smart readers as well as a semi-tutorial on how to write a decent story.

In the novel, reclusive eccentric Amy Gallup teaches an extension fiction writing class at the local college. At first, Amy is pleasantly surprised by the high potential exhibited by this semester’s group of students. However, her dream class soon turns into a nightmare show more when one of the students starts playing malevolent pranks on both Amy and on the other students. The pranks eventually escalate to murder and Amy must use everything at her disposal to try and nab the killer amongst the group. The resource with the most potential is the student’s writing and Amy examines each student’s prose for the clues.

Anyone who has participated in a writing workshop (or for that matter, in any small collegiate class) will be able to relate to the class dynamic portrayed in this novel. As is almost always the case in these courses, the class is comprised of the know-it-all, the slacker, the pretty girl, the class clown, etc. The characters are maddening, amusing, and creepy and all of the other adjectives one can remember people in school being. Ms. Willett’s descriptive talents are truly frightening (pun intended)!

Although, Amy Gallup (the workshop teacher), would admonish me for my use of cliché, I can’t help but describe this novel as a “real page turner!” show less

Amy Gallup is a writer-turned-teacher who runs an evening fiction-writing course. Her current class is turning out to be surprisingly enjoyable for Amy as the students are clever and seem willing to enter into the spirit of critiquing each other’s work. However an undercurrent of hostility creeps in when someone who Amy christens The Sniper starts playing nasty pranks on both the teacher and fellow students.

I nearly didn’t read this book because when I got it home from the library I discovered that one of the prominently placed pull quotes on the cover was something gushing by David Sedaris. I am, apparently, the only person on the planet who doesn’t find Sedaris’ own writing amusing and assumed that if he liked it I would not. show more As I had dragged it all the way home I set out, albeit with low expectations, and happily, enjoyed it spite of myself (and Sedaris) and vowed, once again, to wage a campaign to rid the world of publicity blurbs on books because they do more harm than good.

The characters are terrific. Amy is a loner afraid of being alone, a writer with the misfortune of having had her first book published and has a dozen more quirks. Often I find fictional people with loads of oddities to be unbelievable but I didn’t experience that with Amy. Her foibles and peculiar behaviours were all explained naturally and I not only found her credible but I liked her. A lot. She’s witty, self-deprecating but not depressingly so and clever. Her students fulfil more stereotypical roles but as that is partially their purpose it doesn’t detract from the story and they do manage to surprise on occasion. I was thoroughly enthralled by the depiction of the shifting group dynamics and the development of the characters, much of which is done via their writing and the critique of it. Of course as Amy delivers her mini lectures about what makes good (and bad) writing I was applying that information to what I was reading and, for the most part, found Willett had taken her own character’s advice.

Structurally the book tries several different things and most of them work. The backbone consists of chapters for each class and these include snippets of each student’s writing which are discussed and dissected. In between there are chapters told from Amy’s point of view, extracts from Amy’s blog and diary entries from The Sniper. This could have been confusing but Willett has done a good job of pulling all these elements together to form a narrative. There is one part, a mystery play that one of the students has written that is acted out by the other students, that I failed to see the point of and found incongruous with the rest of the story but it wasn’t jarring enough to detract too much.

In pure mystery terms the plot is less successful than the character development and structure. The police show no interest in any of the nastier events that take place which is not terribly credible and the traditional whodunit with an ever decreasing pool of suspects isn’t done all that well. There’s never more than a vague suspicious shadow cast over any one person and when the villain was finally revealed there wasn’t a huge amount tying them back to an intricately woven trail of evidence. However I really didn’t care about this too much as I was enjoying the non-mystery elements of the story and all the rest the book had to offer.

So I’m not sure this book is really crime fiction although as I seem to be saying that rather a lot lately maybe I just don’t understand the term anymore. Still, I can imagine recommending this to people I know who don’t like reading traditional crime fiction and wouldn’t suggest it for hard core mystery lovers at all. There were aspects of a decent ‘chic-lit’ (I hate that term) title such as Jane Green’s The Beach House but it also reminded me of Ben Elton’s Dead Famous in the way it cleverly deals with archetypes and applies a liberal does of satire to events. Whatever genre it might be I found it a thoroughly entertaining and witty book. show less