Straight Man

Mischievous on the surface, serious at its heart.
Novelist Richard Russo sees comedy in everything and everyone, conjuring characters so wholly alive that they break our hearts, even as we laugh out loud. To wit: when the embattled college professor in the novel Straight Man wets himself while dozing in his office and has to climb through a hole in the ceiling to escape his colleagues, his desperation at once elicits laughter and pity. A witty evisceration of the inner workings of academia, Straight Man casts academics — with their petty feuds and desperate attempts at self-preservation — as a metaphor for life outside the hallowed university halls.

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., an aging English professor with an oeuvre comprised of exactly one novel, ascended to the office of Interim Chair of the West Central Pennsylvania University English Department on the hope he lacked the requisite competence to perpetrate real damage. With grievances against him piling up, a legislature hell-bent on budget cuts for higher education and rumors circulating about lists of "expendable" professors, Devereaux soon finds himself at the center of a series of mounting crises. His colleagues become convinced he will betray them, and plan a mutiny. His bladder suddenly stops functioning — a painful reminder of advancing age. Worse, his philandering, literary-theorist father is returning home after years shacking up with graduate-students-turned-lovers. In the midst of all this, Devereaux, in an act of desperation, stands before a local television news camera, grabs a campus goose by the neck, and threatens to kill "a duck a day" until administration delivers his long-delayed budget.

For all its insularity, academia proves a poignant metaphor for life on the outside: In a sense, most people trade true passions for "tenured" positions. Secretly, we wonder if we were meant for something more, and we long for the thrill of a crisis to shake things up so we can find out. Straight Man is much like its protagonist: mischievous on the surface, but serious at its heart.