`David Helwig's The Stand-In is a witty, inventive, sometimes disturbing excursion into the genre of the dramatic monologue, that literary form perfected in poetry by Robert Browning, and here equally successful in prose, in which a single speaker addressing an unseen audience reveals more about himself than he realizes or perhaps intended. The speaker in this case is a retired university professor who has returned to the small Canadian university, where he taught for many years, to deliver a series of three memorial lectures. As he explains immediately, he is there as a substitute speaker because the original guest lecturer, Denman Tarrington, has died suddenly in New York. It quickly transpires that Professor X, the stand-in (whose name we never learn), was a colleague of Tarrington at the same university, and what follows are not so much three lectures as three virtuoso stream of consciousness outpourings of personal reminiscence, to the frustration of the professor's audience and the entertainment of the reader. Ironically, the title of the lecture series is "The Music of No Mind," and if one were to seek an analogy between this novella and a musical composition, the choice would have to be Elgar's Enigma Variations, in which the composer claimed there exists a hidden unheard but familiar theme, the identification of which has baffled music scholars ever since. What is important in Professor X's apparently dithering extemporaneous digressions is not so much what is said as what is unsaid or hinted at.'