Dear Committee Members: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

person more inclined to socialize with machines rather than human beings. His approach to problem solving is characterized by sullenness punctuated by occasional brief bouts of good judgment.
    Whatever I can do to assist in your—or any other firm’s—hiring of Mr. Napp I will accomplish with resolution and zeal.
    Hopefully, and with fingers crossed, Jason T. Fitger
    Professor of Creative Writing and English

November 20, 2009
    Gar Canfield
    Zentex Corporation
    8591 Taylor Boulevard
    Panama, Ohio 45807
    Dear Mr. Canfield,
    This letter very warmly endorses the application of Troy Larpenteur, who has informed me of his desire to secure a position as sales associate in the Zentex Corporation.
    I have known Troy Larpenteur for twenty-three years: we attended graduate school together. Troy was widely acknowledged to be one of the most gifted and original writers to pass through the infamous Seminar under the tutelage of H. Reginald Hanf. (If you don’t know Hanf’s work: please head straight to the library or bookstore—I give you leave to put this letter aside and come back to it later—to find a copy of Testimony in Red , a finalist for the National Book Award, which, in the absence of cronyism among the judges that year, would have won.)
    Though he appears not to have mentioned it on his résumé, Troy Larpenteur published a brilliant lyrical novella called Second Mind , which was showered with praise but underappreciated,as are many pathbreaking works; it is now out of print. Subsequently he labored for the better part of a decade on his magnum opus, a novel, which was lost along with his pregnant wife when the cabin lent to them by a friend, a cabin in which they were taking a long-awaited vacation, was struck by lightning during a storm. The randomness of his wife Navia’s death—the vacation had been urged upon them; Troy had driven to the store for supplies before the storm’s scheduled arrival; the car got a flat tire and Troy stumbled back down the flooded road to find the cabin in flames—defeated his belief in art and quelled his aspirations. He never returned to the novel. He moved to India, where Navia had spent her early childhood, and wiped himself off the grid for a dozen years.
    You may be searching this letter for references to Troy’s “relevant experience.” (Troy asked me to limit myself in this recommendation to the qualities and attributes that will make him an asset to your firm.) Let me suggest that, no matter the variety of employment, there is nothing more relevant or crucial than an aptitude for original thought and imaginative expression. When I think back twenty-three years to the sight of Troy across from me at the Seminar table, his hair looking as if he had slept on the floor of the library by the vending machines (he usually had), his face alight with intelligence and anticipation, I believe the best years of my life will be the ones in which I had the privilege of hearing him read his work aloud to our group. Even HRH—Professor Hanf—fell silent when Troy slid his pages fromthe battered portmanteau in which he liked to keep his writing; we waited on tenterhooks, knowing that whatever Troy read would alter something within us, changing the way in which we understood language and its cumulative power, the way it made our lives feel capacious, infusing us each week during our three-or four-hour-long sessions with the sensation that we were at long last about to apprehend … what? Unlike many of his peers, myself included, Troy was free of egoism. He cared about his work, and others’ work, as opposed to “success.” He was, and remains, an intellectually nimble, brilliant, generous man.
    I understand that Troy has applied for the position of sales associate. This is a foreign concept to me: here in the academy we are unaccustomed to salesmanship of any kind, even to the faintest of efforts to make ourselves presentable or attractive to others. Nevertheless I can readily attest