Free Dear Committee Members: A Novel by Julie Schumacher

wish MTV and I had kept more closely in touch.
    In other unnerving Seminar alumni news I’ve heard from Troy: the poor bastard is back in the U.S. after a decade in India and is scouring the private sector for jobs. The letter I got from him was short and cryptic; it made me envision him living in a canvas tent and washing his underwear in a stream. His only address seems to be a P.O. box. I didn’t tell him about MTV, being loath to notify a person with Troy’s history about anyone’s demise … Has he written to you? The idea of a writer with Troy’s luminous gifts selling widgets—I find it painful. My intuition tells me he wouldn’t have reestablished contact unless he was writing. Put that in your agent’s pipe and smoke it.
    Which reminds me: the purpose of this letter is actually to recommend to you a student, Vivian Zelles, who read something favorable about you in Publishers Weekly and, having learnedthat you and I were Seminar friends, has waged an implacable daily campaign in my office, insisting that I query you about her work. Zelles is a comparative literature student currently finishing a coming-of-age story purportedly narrated by the first genetically engineered human-feline cross (specifically, a human/cheetah). She began the novel as a memoir, writing about growing up in an immigrant family in California. I found the project to be a bit quiet (that is, dull), which may have led to the manuscript’s current confabulation—a pseudo autobiography in which the speaker portrays herself as a fifteen-year-old girl/cheetah amalgam. Ms. Zelles informs me that the human/animal blend mirrors the false distinction between fiction and fact and points to the necessity of the hybrid form. Whatever the hell she wants to call it—a mem-vel, a novoir—the new incarnation of the book is effectively startling, especially the scene in which the protagonist devours and then remorsefully regurgitates her little brother. It’s possible, I suppose, that an independent publisher (how many are left, still clinging to their ragged life rafts?) might be intrigued by the project. To that end, the indefatigable Ms. Zelles will be sending, under separate cover next week, an excerpt. See what you think.
    Meanwhile I gather—twelve weeks on—you’re still mulling Browles’s sample? Eleanor spurned him at Bentham (twisting the knife in the wound by admitting Ms. Zelles), after which I asked Janet to arrange for some money to be funneled towardBrowles via an RAship at the law school, but to no avail. Ken—take his sample out of the fucking envelope and read it. Browles doesn’t need a big advance; he needs an editor with a functional brain and some vision. (And please refrain from selling the book to the narcoleptics who published Save Me for Later: Georgianne is barely sentient, and Simon has forgotten, it seems, how to answer his phone.)
    And of course, let me know if you have any interest in Vivian Zelles, whose tabby-infused concoction will cross your desk soon.
    Eager, as always, to hear from you,
    Jay
    P.S.: I need to lodge a belated complaint against the poet—Randolph Marlin—whom I invited to campus in December on your say-so; he was even more of an egomaniac than I expected. Where do poets—with their readership in the low double figures—get off exhibiting that kind of flagrant self-regard? He quizzed the undergrads about his work and then faulted their answers. He wanted to know which of his poems they’d committed to memory. Good god: it was all I could do to restrain myself from saying that my own objective was to try to forget his wretched, soporific lines as completely as possible. I tried to get him drunk at the reception so as to humiliate him for the students’ benefit (believe me, they would have beengrateful), but he poured four or five glasses of expensive scotch (my tab, of course) down his gullet as if emptying wash water into a drain.
    Next time you hand-select a member of your menagerie for a