A low point of each week was the staff meeting, where Roth would vie with other egos in trying to spice up the syllabus with a little Orwell, or tweak the weekly lesson plan in otherwise interesting ways. The head of the composition faculty was a Tolstoy scholar named Ed Wasiolek, whom Roth would skewer in Letting Go as the pompous Spigliano: “As it were, my ass,” the narrator reflects, apropos of Spigliano’s remark that they should point out to students “how Gibbon impresses upon the reader the geography of the event with the geography, as it were, of the prose.”
