“Quirky… vividly original… marvelously poignant… painfully funny… a magnetically lyrical, bittersweet, and resonant tale… pure bliss from its lovely title to its ineffably moving denouement.”
NO MAJOR SPOILERS
Jay Fitger is Professor of Creative Writing and English at Payne University, somewhere in the American mid-West. His days are filled writing letters of recommendation in presumably fruitless attempts to usher his charges into gainful employment, railing against the arcane mysteries of online forms and oiling up his ex-wife and ex-lover.
He strives, manfully at first, and subsequently with increasing desperation, to publicise his most promising student’s work, “Accountant in a Bordello”, a shattering reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”. Meanwhile, the English Department’s faculty buildings crumble and leak about him (Economics’ are getting renovated, so why not English?).
