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When Richard Peck retired from academia – one position was as president of the University of New Mexico – he resumed a writing career.
It was a career Peck had put on hold and he has since been churning out a variety of novels, science fiction short stories, plays and film scripts and historic nonfiction from his home in Placitas.
Now, to the interest (or chagrin) of former colleagues, Peck has published “One Jim West,” which sounds like an address, but is an engrossing, dark, but riotously entertaining and witty satire on the academic world.
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“One Jim West” by Richard E. Peck Repertory Publishing, $15, 219 pp. |
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James Random West is a writer/teacher with a “perfect” job in the English Department at the fictional Blue Ridge University, a nondescript Virginia college. While trying to enjoy his position’s perfection, he can’t help but long for ways to escape from it.
West leads a large cast of characters helpfully listed (a la Russian novels) at the outset. This way-more-than-quirky bunch includes Blue Ridge’s administrators, students and faculty; other writers and assorted hangers-on and spouses of the above, all in some way connected to a literary conference planned for Blue Ridge. Portents of lurking disaster abound.
Peck has constructed his novel through a series of communications, more than the characters’ face-to-face encounters and conversations. They includes emails, letters, meeting minutes, rough drafts of stories, clippings from the college newspaper, the Blue Ridge Turkey, and the local paper’s society page … as well as a few threatening notes collaged from a snipped alphabet and sent by an anonymous harasser, “The Phantom.”
By weaving the story through these missives and written pieces, all set in various typefaces, Peck gives slyly distinctive voices to the characters in a way not possible in a more conventional narrative or dialogue. (One also wonders if these academics, especially the writers among them, would rather write to each other than converse.)
Peck is a gifted writer with a sensitive ear for language and a refined taste for the absurd, qualities he’s deftly employed to create this delightfully diverting and enjoyable frolic through a rarefied and ridiculous world.
Robert Woltman is an Albuquerque poet and writer.
Witty satire abound with academia’s quirky characters
