"The Shakespeare Requirement" (2018) and "The English Experience: A Novel" (2023), by Julie Schumacher

Julie Schumacher has grown as a narrator; she reads both books and excels in the second one, especially when inhabiting the voices of jaded female students. Her forte is not the plot but shifting spontaneously among perspectives from disparate points of self-absorption. Schumacher understands that time is the ultimate scarce resource, and that self-expression is the ultimate urge. Her protagonist, Jason Fitger, pays with the precision of his prose for the reader's scarce attention to Fitger's self. Fitger succeeds. So do some of his students in The English Experience; they make up with sincerity for what they lack in fluency. Janet fails.

Writing is trading in time and over time, with others and with one's future selves. The writer sinks time so that others do not have to. The writer thinks so that others can think better.