A quirky, genre-bending meditation on communication in all its forms
The title of Frederick David’s The Memoir of a Student is, on the face of it, misleading. The work is a hodgepodge of genres that the word “memoir” fails to convey, and David, who returns to school following what he describes as years of “peripatetic” existence, is hardly a typical student.
In another sense, however, the title is apt. There is an old-fashioned quality to its matter-of-factness that suits the book precisely because it is so incongruous; like a 19th-century essayist, David uses a generic title as license to meander and digress, delighting in the process of reflection in a way that rewards slow reading. The sly humor of the subtitle (“Communication: A Personal Opinion”) establishes the work’s other key ingredient: a modern thread of self-referentiality.
The Memoir of a Student is, after all, communicating about communication. More specifically, it is communicating David’s experience of an 11-week course in communication. In fact, the book emerged from an assignment asking students to reflect on the lectures they attended, and relics of this remain, most obviously in the organization of the chapters by session. However, in between summaries of lectures and class activities, David riffs freely, touching on everything from the significance of radio in cultures with strong oral histories to an incident when a flight attendant mistook him for a movie star.
The resulting work is so idiosyncratic that it can really only be assessed on its own terms. Readers will likely find some sections more compelling than others. In particular, the lingering scaffolding of the original assignment will not be to everyone’s taste; the final few pages, for instance, occasionally sound like a course evaluation form (“As the exercises were practical, we could feel what we were learning”). However, noting that I personally might have preferred a tighter edit seems beside the point given that the book is to a large degree about form rather than content—not what is said, but how. Or maybe my reaction is the point, in the sense that communication necessarily involves reception. David describes the logbook from which the book originated as “a personal outlook on the communication course, reflecting how we perceived, felt, and interpreted it,” tacitly inviting readers to use his logbook, too, as a jumping-off point for considering how the packaging of a message impacts the way they respond to it.
David’s musings on then-novel technology and its implications for communication especially stand out in the current era of AI. Other observations might skirt the line of truism but are transformed by David’s wit: “There is nothing we cannot achieve when we put our mind to it. That is the triumph of the indomitable human spirit. I am just mentioning this en passant.”
This deflationary turn is typical of David, whose great gift is stylistic. The work abounds with extended metaphors (David opens by likening an icebreaker activity to isotopes colliding) and self-aware humor, as when David writes, “Like a module within a computer program, I can interact with others but remain independent and in control of my performance. I am not saying I am a staunch and unconditional individualist though. I am only implying it.” As this quip suggests, David’s rhetorical flourishes draw attention to the nuances and foibles of communication that we hardly register in day-to-day life; they also give David’s voice its charming blend of wryness and exuberance.
Readers seeking a straightforward narrative may not find it here, but for those who appreciate style and the subject of communication, The Memoir of a Student offers a rewardingly off-kilter experience that is funny, surprising, and thoughtful.
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