The Guest Lecture

A Novel

By: Martin Riker

Narrated by: Vanessa Johansson

In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself.

Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes's pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations.

With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman's midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.

©2023 Martin Riker (P)2023 Tantor

Deep thoughts and fun listening

Well read and beautifully written. The voice of the professor is pitch perfect, and she manages to be thought provoking and sympathetic, even when she’s whining about not getting tenure.

Enjoyable book!

Enjoyable novel throughout, great narration!
Superb inclusion of Ulysses!
Nothing very sophisticated, but just right.

I wish I had stopped reading

The author never talked to an economist before writing a book about an economist. I know a few left-wing female economists personally and they pepper econ terms throughout their lives just like all economists do. The protagonist here does not even though there were many opportunities to do so. She doesn’t even consider trade offs. Nobody reads Keynes, they use New Keynesian DSGE models. Also, the protagonist is clearly insane and very boring. I would have set the book down without finishing but I kept thinking there’d be a surprise ending where we’d find out what a terrible person the protagonist is . . . but no.