TRICKSTER IN TWEED
This book begins with “the call” from a physician informing Mr. Frentz that he has “squamous cell carcinoma” in his lymph nodes, and that this result is surprising because “this form of cancer does not originate in the lymph system . . . [which] means it’s moved there from somewhere else.” In many ways, the resulting story is all about finding out where that “somewhere else” was, and once the source was located, to find a way to cure it. That the cancer itself is both real and metaphorical—indicative of cells gone wrong amid an academic life gone oftentimes wild—sets up the twin strands of this remarkable narrative in ways that reveal what the rhetorician Kenneth Burke once called “the thatness of this, and the thisness of that.”
The "trickster" is a well known icon drawn from the American Indian folklore and it suits Frentz well. In a book that details the frustrations of academic life--from petty jealousies to serious illness and all the fault lines of bureaucracy, sorrow, and failure in between--Frentz's trickster navigates the darker side of professing, advising, and contributing to a scholarly community.
Trickster in Tweed is a tour de force on academic culture written with a compelling and artful narrative style all its own. But it is also the story of a latter-day Robert Pirsig-inspired Phaedrus searching not only for Quality but also for voice within an academy that all too often denies or depreciates it. The vital connection between Quality and voice, between denial and depreciation of one and the demise of the other coupled with his own self-questioning depression and cancer is perfectly pitched to the Trickster’s brave discovery that achieving one’s own voice is at once a lifesaving accomplishment and an important gift of Quality to his readers and students.
This book should be required reading for all who answer the call to profess and to a life of scholarship.
