RFT Asks Martin Riker About His Latest Novel The Guest Lecture

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Martin Riker's novel The Guest Lecture is one of the buzziest books of literary fiction this year.

St. Louisan Martin Riker's new novel The Guest Lecture is one of the buzziest books of literary fiction this year, getting rave reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Times, among other taste-making outlets. The novel covers one night in the life of the mind of an economist suffering a fit of insomnia on the eve of the eponymous lecture — though that description belies the humor that runs through what Riker has written, a humor that will land especially hard for anyone who every so often has trouble falling asleep. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You're at the top of the heap in the literary world right now, right?

This kind of coverage is really gratifying, especially the New York Review of Books piece, because it was a really long, substantive, smart piece. I was blown away, actually. It's the kind of coverage that there just isn't that much of in the literary world anymore. That was the most exciting thing for me.

The Guest Lecture is a truly funny read. Do you consider yourself a funny guy IRL?

Although I think I am jolly, I'm much funnier on paper. The kind of humor that's in the book is a very written humor. It's a humor that relies entirely on the construction and cadences of sentences. Some of it is conceptual, but a lot of it is the structure of the sentence and how it lands the way it does, the timing of the joke.

Does working on the publishing side of the business affect your writing?

I've worked in small press publishing for 25 years. And I didn't start publishing my own books until 2018. It's not that I wasn't writing all that time. I wrote a few novels that I didn't even try to publish because they weren't any good. I love writing, and I do it because I love it. But I don't feel pressure to succeed as a writer; I just enjoy the act of doing it. There's a freedom there that is sort of analogous to the freedom of having tenure at a university that allows you to think outside the box.

Did I read somewhere that David Foster Wallace was a professor of yours?

He was actually my master's thesis advisor back at Illinois State University in the late '90s, and we were friends after. Actually I have in my closet two manuscripts of my own books that I never published with David's writing all over them. They're in a box of stuff that I'm going to sell to send my kid to college.

How are you making the most of the spotlight being on you?

I'm anxious for it to be done. I really am. I never enjoyed having to think about whether there's going to be more coverage or what the coverage is going to be, all that kind of stuff. I'm thankful for good stuff that happens and that kind of attention, but I don't like having to live in anticipation of it. The good news is that stuff doesn't last that long. Publicity doesn't last.