Interim by Matt Roberson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Interim by Matt Roberson Matthew Kirkpatrick (bio) interim Matt Roberson Red Flag Poetry https://www.redflagpoetry.com/store/p35/Interim_by_Matthew_Roberson.html 122 pages; Print, $15.00 Matthew Roberson's Interim joins a long tradition of campus novels; Roberson's is particularly delightful—a hilarious satire of university administration that will, depending on a reader's experience of academia, read as either absurd or right on the nose. As a professor, I found Interim particularly fun—the novel felt at times as if it was written specifically for humanities faculty. That's not to say the novel won't register with non-academic readers—it will—but there's a specific kind of joy and kinship one [End Page 100] feels reading such a dead-on send-up of an institution that often seems too ridiculous to exist. Interim's told from the point of view of Rob Roy, an English professor at a beleaguered STATE university, who agrees to spend a year as Interim Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities at the request of a friend. Roy doesn't want the job, but he needs the money and agrees to do his friend a favor, a decision he immediately regrets. Plunged unprepared into the murk of higher ed administration, Roy stuffs himself at catered events, navigates the difficult personalities of his co-administrators, and tries to unravel the (probably nefarious) plot of Dr. Steve Klütz—the closest thing to a villain in a novel full of characters who, like real college administrators, seem to oscillate in the spectrum between incompetence and actual evil (or at least bad motivations). The novel's world feels realistic—Rob Roy's STATE university probably reflects an off-kilter, amplified version of Roberson's own academic experience, but soaked with Roberson's humor and pushed to the edge of absurdity. The novel is sometimes Kafkaesque; for example, we find Roy wandering from one lead to another in a seemingly endless search for rival Klütz's office. The machinations of the College Curriculum Committee, as they scrutinize the minutiae of FRACCs (Finalized Reports and Academic Curricular Charges), seem exceptionally bureaucratically extreme, but also painfully accurate for one who has been in such meetings. Roberson's humor is also sometimes Pynchonesque—in the bureaucratic tangle of seemingly endless committees with acronyms like FRACC and OAOACC and in characters with names like Trout and Klütz that remind readers we're in Roberson's distorted version of reality. The novel reveals a world rarely seen by faculty or students—both mostly absent from the novel—in spaces rarely seen by Roy, even, as he shows up for endless meetings with administrators he doesn't know in buildings he's never been to. Unlike typical campus novels, Interim is interested in exposing university administration by depicting it in all its bloat and minutiae. This is anatomically correct satire, gory and real, not just caricature. The novel is dead-on in its portrait of the underfunded American public university suffering under late-stage capitalism, and while the laughs-to-pages ratio is unusually high, what's underneath is serious—educational institutions are threatened from every direction, especially the inside. Interim doesn't directly talk about the [End Page 101] death of the university, but that's what we see: a once-great institution suffering from the increasing heaviness of bureaucracy. Interim's Rob Roy serves to show us the sometimes irrational, sometimes ludicrous world of public university administration from a professor's point of view. Classically at odds with one another, faculty and administration here, too, exist in conflict despite seemingly similar goals. While Roberson's satire does bite, it's also generous to those who are often so easy to ridicule. By focusing on Roy's stint in administration—suddenly himself a much-maligned associate dean, or "deanlet"—we see him earnestly trying to navigate what others have been doing for years. Through the irrationality of the institution portrayed in the novel, Roy's role as administrator allows us to see not just the absurdity but also a collection of real-seeming people who, like Roy, are just trying to figure things out; even the...