David Sedaris famously saved Jincy Willett’s career in 2002 by
loudly and repeatedly proclaiming her Jenny and the Jaws of Life the funniest book of short stories he’d ever read. Jenny had
been out of print for over a decade, but by the end of Sedaris’s book
tour, it was resurrected and climbing onto best-seller lists. Willett
followed the Jenny revival with a novel called Winner of the
National Book Award. It was funny and sharp and full of the dark,
witty humor that induces besotted book critics to carelessly bandy
about names like Dorothy Parker. Despite the hopeful title,
Winner fairly disappeared on publication.
The Writing Class, Willett’s second novel, simply isn’t as
good as her other books—it’s not as sharp and it’s a bit too
conventional. Amy, its main character, is—as with most of
Willett’s main characters—a lonely middle-aged woman who consoles
herself with books. She is a onetime novelist who has faded into
obscurity and teaches writing classes. In classic Murder, She
Wrote fashion, one of the students in the class goes sour, then
mad, and there will be murder and mayhem before the book is
through.
Willett is still capable of great images, as when Amy watches very
small children on Halloween: “Amy couldn’t remember this part she was
watching now, the first and probably most important part, when you had
no idea why they were wrapping you up in a sheet with jagged eyeholes
and leading you into the dark void.”
Some enjoyable mystery tropes get punctured here: Amy is
considerably slower at solving mysteries than most amateur sleuths, for
example. But by the end, the book feels like the outstanding beginning
of a tepid mystery series. Some of the darts Willett throws are
blunted. She spends roughly 50 pages (most of the first third of the
novel) describing the nastiness of anonymous blog commenters—to
little effect, other than a pleasant discussion of how to pronounce
“asshat.” On the whole, The Writing Class is a dud with a few
impressive flourishes, best appreciated by readers already in Willett’s
thrall, after reading her two previous, brilliant books.