councilor.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 11/10/24/11:14 |
| chronicle.com
'Something for Nothing' By Kacie Glenn David Fox's life is not working out as planned. During his college years, the path ahead seemed clear: graduate with honors, obtain Ph.D. at a prestigious institution, accept tenure-track position in large metropolitan area. But with his doctorate in hand, David finds himself stuck in Knittersville, N.Y., with a one-year appointment at undistinguished Kester College. He's deflated by the dismal job market, intimidated by his colleagues in the economics department, overwhelmed by his teaching duties, desperate to morph his dissertation into something publishable, and tempted by a voluptuous thesis advisee—all as he suffers the indignity of living in a town that is "not Manhattan" in every possible way. A duller-sounding place than Knittersville never was—because it's fictional. So is Kester College, and so is David Fox, which considerably raises his chances of landing flyover interviews and getting embroiled in academic intrigue. David is the protagonist of Something for Nothing (MIT Press), a novel by Michael W. Klein, who is a professor of international economic affairs at Tufts University. David's prospects improve when he receives an e-mail from the Center to Research Opportunities for a Spiritual Society (Cross), a right-wing organization seeking to promote scholarship that supports an evangelical-Christian agenda. Its director, Bill Crocker, is interested in publishing and publicizing a long-forgotten graduate paper of David's called "Something for Nothing." The paper shows the success of a high-school abstinence program in lowering teen-pregnancy rates and raising academic achievement. David—who is liberal, Jewish, and no fan of abstinence—worries about the social ramifications, but not so much that he insists on a toned-down interpretation of the paper's results. After all, the benefits are sweet: With the news coverage come respect and clout, along with better chances at a tenure-track job. So, against his better judgment, he keeps his head down and mouth shut, at least until things start to unravel. Economics and academe permeate the novel. Klein's prose reflects a scholarly attention to detail; for example, he includes e-mail correspondence from job committees and a transcript of David's ill-fated interview on a conservative radio show. Like any good economist, David weighs the costs and benefits of every choice, whether it involves his paper for Cross, his dealings with the attractive advisee, or his shirt/tie combination on the first day of class. So how much of Klein's book is autobiographical? "I never had any of my work promoted by a think tank (right-wing or other), I was never interviewed on a right-wing talk show, and I never came close to having an affair with a student," responds the author in an e-mail. "That said, I found it easy and fun to draw on my quarter-century in academia to inform the novel—things like the anxiety facing professors before the first class of the semester, the seating patterns of students, the way professors have to self-organize their days, and the challenges of the job market." The author is on leave from Tufts, serving as chief economist in the Office of International Affairs at the Treasury Department. Although none of his characters work in government, all are to some extent driven by politics. Their heated conflicts reflect the country's changing climate, Klein notes. He writes smoothly and precisely, with an undercurrent of quiet humor. That humor is never more successful than when it takes aim at the rituals of academe. David's explanation of scholarly publication brings little enlightenment to his family at Thanksgiving: "There was a collective sense of bewilderment at this; why spend all your time writing articles that were only reluctantly accepted for magazines that people didn't want to read? And for a job that really didn't pay that well and kept you in some little nebishe town?" (Later, when David modestly refers to a mainstream article mentioning his work, his mother exclaims, "Not a big deal? David, people in hotels all over the country read USA Today.") Novel-writing came naturally to Klein: "I started out college as an English major, but after my first economics class (and a star-crossed class on Shakespeare), I decided to put comparative advantage to use. Then, one morning in April 2007, I woke up with the first line of the novel in my head. I woke the next morning with the title. That weekend, I spent Sunday afternoon working out the plot, writing my ideas in a black-speckled notebook." Even the timing of Klein's inspiration fell in serendipitously with his responsibilities at Tufts: "Once the semester ended, I decided to devote myself full time to the novel. The first draft only took seven weeks. ... The whole process felt surprisingly similar to writing a research paper, something I had not at all anticipated." Perhaps Klein's overlapping roles of scholar and writer contributed to the novel's themes as well as its plot. The lesson of Something for Nothing is one of reason and restraint. The book's villains are its ideological extremists: Bill Crocker, an ex-tobacco-industry smooth talker who believes that moral principles should trump economic ones, and Randolph Carlson, a professor of sociology who teaches a course called "Threats to Liberty" and likes to accuse everyone and anyone of supporting capitalist greed. It's the diligent, truth-seeking economists we root for, even when they blunder. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho