Aaron Arnold's Reviews > The Guest Lecture

An intriguing light novel about sleepless nights and the thought of John Maynard Keynes, two very different subjects you don’t often see linked together. Abby is a feminist economist suffering a bout of insomnia while staying in a hotel. She has just been denied tenure, but she’s still scheduled to give a talk the next day regarding John Maynard Keynes’ famous 1930 work Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren (which in my opinion is one of the greatest essays ever written). She starts tossing and turning, and her nerves over the speech combined with her disappointment over the tenure denial is all set to give her a major late-night life crisis, but the spirit of Keynes himself appears in her thoughts to guide her through her speech anxiety as well as the emotional fallout of many other important events in her life.

The book isn’t quite stream-of-consciousness (thank god), but it does a great job of depicting the torrent of involuntary mental free-associations that will be all-too-familiar to anyone who’s had a poorly-timed 3am journey through every regret they’ve ever had, mixed with a surprisingly substantive exploration of Keynes’s legendary piece about what people might do with real wealth and abundance for the first time in human history. One might say that Abby’s inability to commit to any task mirrors our own inability to stick on the smooth path of progress that Keynes was so evocative of, but Riker is not so crass as to make his moral so obvious. The surreal ending, where Keynes himself somehow begins to give Abby’s speech for her, might not be to everyone’s taste, but then again the whole rest of the novel has been basically operating on dream logic - has she actually been asleep the whole time?