At first I found this book merely "funny" -- in an ongoing-chuckle (rather than laugh-out-loud) sort of way. Naturally it reminded me of my own 6 years as a grad student/adjunct professor in English departments, with perhaps even more backbiting than we graduate students were aware of. It seemed to me that the novel, set in an English department in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, made excessive use of gags - our English professor hero donning a fake nose and glasses before the local TV crew and grabbing a duck by the neck and threatening to kill a duck a day until he gets English department budget; our hero's nose being mangled by the metal wiring from a spiral notebook wielded by a faculty enemy who smacked him after he made a disparaging comment about her poetry; and the stereotyped characters like the fiction student with his misogynist slasher stories, the sweet yet beleaguered department secretary who ends every statement with a question mark, the bimbo faculty wife who is always stoned and likes to wiggle her toes, or the youngest member of the English faculty who is so busy trying to be politically correct and gender neutral, often-adding "or she" to anyone else's use of the word "he", that he's dubbed "Orshee" for the extent of the novel. Writing these examples, the book does seem funny, perhaps funnier than I experienced it while reading. The cliche phrase "It's funny because it's true!" comes to mind, and that is perhaps the point, reversed: some of these characters were familiar enough to me that they aren't even funny anymore - merely sad - and the parts that are hyperbolic to what I've experienced in real life thus struck me as hyperbole - i.e. in this context, merely gags.While another cliche goes that "we can all use a good laugh," maybe I just appreciate a more serious take on life -- and, to be fair, even the novel's other characters tell our hero that *they'd* appreciate a more serious take on life than his best efforts. Hank, our hero, is the opposite of the "straight man", though occasionally he sets himself up as the straight man so that someone else can get off a joke. It felt for awhile like there might be some important issues in this book somewhere, but everything was so lighthearted, so deft, that it was hard to take any of the issues seriously. Shrug.On this theme of comedy versus serious themes, Russo catches my attention about 2/3 of the way through the book, with our character teaching a lesson to his class. Hank, after his aforementioned threat to kill a duck a day until he gets budget for his department, asked his class to write persuasive essays arguing if he should or should not actually make good on his threat. (This assignment got a laugh out of me - I wish I could have given such an assignment to my students.) While most of the class turns in essays saying Hank should go through with his threat, he argues they're wrong:"Because," I explain to them, without conviction, "it was a comic, not a serious, threat. Because the man who threatened to kill a duck a day until he got a budget was wearing a fake nose and glasses. Because it makes no sense to carry out a comic threat to serious consequence."Needless to say, we end where we began, unpersuaded. My argument, that tragedy and comedy don't mix, that they must remain discrete, runs contrary to their experience. Indeed, it may run contrary to my own. These students have watched this very class begin in low comedy and end in something, if not serious, at least no longer funny. They file out, sullen, confused (268).With this, I have the sense that Russo is speaking directly to me, his reader: Pay attention, chica, I'm not just a funnyboy. Not that he seems to come down with a clear thesis about whether one can or can't successfully combine tragedy and comedy, but rather that he seems to be asking that we pay attention to the tension between the two.And the book does begin to carry more weight, as seemingly hyperbolic characters become increasingly more real, and thus more felt by the reader, as the pages turn. Russo's humor also begins to carry gravitas around the thesis that, with middle age stability comes an unstable longing for change -- even if that change might be disastrous to the one longing for it. We begin to see Hank's antics as simply a way to break out of the rut of his life. And, in a few moments of sincerity that juxtapose the humor, something truly poignant is articulated:I do not want to die. I'm as sure of this, I think, as a man can reasonably be. I do not want to learn, when I speak to [my doctor] tomorrow, that the asymmetry he thought he felt in my prostate is a tumor, and yet, there is a part of me that would thrill to receive such news. Why that should be I cannot imagine. Nor do I want the woman that I'm married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not. The thought of Lily's having found someone to replace me is not welcome, but an urgent new love--and what makes the world stranger than love?--is a thing that I could half-wish for her. For me (323).Why do I find this paragraph so moving? Because it's the first sincere thing Hank has said in 323 pages? Maybe. Do I find it all the more sincere because of this? Perhaps. And perhaps, too, it's because I can understand the sentiment, and it helps me to understand Hank's longings that have caused him to act so unseriously (the very thing I couldn't understand). Ultimately, it seems to me that the tension between this longing for change/alienation and the habitual comfort of stability/community is what this seemingly light and funny book is about. Hank's confession that he feels a thrill at the possibility of dire news is offset by his acknowledgement that we deeply rely on the weight of our existing life, to hold on to ourselves:The truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own. [...] Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer.Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You're not the kind of man who" (374).Hank explains to us earlier in the novel that "I know you, Al. You're not the kind of man who..." is an exercise on characterization for fiction students - one I used in my own classrooms, when I taught fiction. "He was the sort of man who still opened doors for women." "She was the sort of woman who'd remember something you told her 5 years ago, and use it against you now in an argument as a sign of some moral failing." "I know you, Al. You're not the kind of man who would claim to have read something you hadn't."The fiction exercise is useful for sharpening students' writing - to get at the essence of someone's character with only a few words. As a statement on us, we living human beings, it's interesting to think of how we're simultaneously supported and weighed down by the knowledge others have of us. I sometimes feel the longing to start all over, make all new friends and loved ones, and thereby erase all things from my past I'm ashamed of. But who would I be then? And who could I look to, to better understand?
University life has served as an irresistible subject for some of the funniest satire in modern literature.After teaching briefly at Sarah Lawrence College, Mary McCarthy set the standard high with "The Groves of Academe" (1952), her acerbic satire of a liberal college for women. Just two years ago Jane Smiley, who teaches at Iowa State, lambasted a Midwestern university in "Moo: A Novel," (Random House) a bestseller that sprawled across dozens of strange and hilarious characters.The narrator of the latest addition to this genre, "Straight Man" by Richard Russo, observes wryly that "virtually everybody in the English department has a half-written novel squirreled away in a desk drawer. Sad little vessels all. Scruffy the Tugboat, lost and scared on the open sea. All elegantly written, all with the same artistic goal - to evidence a superior sensibility."Fortunately, Russo's fully written novel is neither sad nor overwrought for he evinces plenty of elegance and flawless timing. He demonstrates that it's possible to laugh at, and with, someone simultaneously.The novel opens at the peak of a budget crisis at West Central Pennsylvania University that threatens to fall with particular severity on the English department. Forced into the center of this debate is the reluctant interim chair, William Henry Devereaux Jr., who proudly admits that his "lack of administrative skill is legend."In a moment of ill-conceived fury he preempts the televised dedication of a new Technical Careers Center by threatening to kill one of the campus geese every day until a budget arrives on his desk.With outrageous but straight-faced retorts that endear him to us but infuriate his colleagues, Devereaux struggles to endure and even enjoy the contentious characters who despise their jobs at this third-rate university, but like the campus geese are too lazy to fly away.The author, who taught at Colby College, has assembled the usual cast of temperamental faculty and incompetent administrators that devotees of comic university novels will recognize. There's an earnest young professor so devoted to gender-neutral language that Hank refers to him as "Orshe"; a modern theorist who rejects literature entirely and teaches only from videotapes of television sitcoms; a poet who communicates almost entirely by filing grievances against her colleagues. Here are the frustrated high school teachers and faux scholars who never planned to stay more than a year or two but grew fatally comfortable when the university was expanding and now find themselves trapped by their unmarketability.Surrounded by accusations of betrayal in a rumor-infested department about to lose 20 percent of its faculty, Devereaux has a deep, redeeming affection for his colleagues as he goads them into open hostility with his straight man routine.Even the unpublished poet who damages his nose with her spiral binder receives nothing but his benign understanding and ironic asides. "People have only a finite amount of meanness in them," Devereaux observes, "and most times they exhaust it quickly." Though the novel is unrelentingly funny, it is Hank's deep appreciation for his colleagues' humanity that raises it above so many other academic satires.Life outside the hallowed walls of the university is no more stable for Hank than in his panicked department. While he worries that his long-suffering wife may be having an affair with the dean, he tries not to offer advice to his aliterate daughter as her marriage breaks up. Running beneath this hectic week lies Hank's dread of his brilliant father's return. This repressed, but constant concern about inheriting his errant father's talent, selfishness, and illness, pulls the novel into the psychological depth that confirms the author's extraordinary talent for drawing characters.Russo writes repartee that crackles with wit but never slides into artifice. Though his characters are often struggling against deep-seated sadness, the force of his wit is enough to convince us that such pain and sadness are not inevitable or final.The feminist poet with the lethal binder finally admits, "You may not believe me, but I've always liked you, Hank. You're like a character in a good book. Almost real, you know?"She hits it - and him - on the nose.http://www.csmonitor.com/1997/1006/10...
What do You think about Straight Man (1998)?
Ahhh. Never has a book made me feel so good about not going into academia.William "Hank" Henry Devereaux, Jr. is the embattled head of a rivalry-tastic English department in a crumbling liberal arts college. Over the novel's four days, all heck breaks loose -- while his wife is out of town, Hank's department goes haywire, his daughter's marriage dissolves, his nose is mutilated by a coworker, he threatens to kill a goose on local television . . . oh, there's a drunken episode involving a hot tub, and another scene in which our hero is stuck in a heating vent while spying on a department meeting. In short, it's great serio-comic fiction.Why'd I give it three stars? The characters -- particularly Hank -- were just a little too cynical for my tastes. This is a book that may "speak" to me more when I'm middle-aged myself. Eh.
—Brooke Shirts
[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.]I was all excited when I first stumbled across this in the "New Additions" section of the Chicago Public Library's ebook collection, because I thought I had randomly come across Pulitzer winner Richard Russo's newest title just minutes after it had been announced at the website, and therefore was going to get to check it out before anybody else; but in fact, although it was new to their collection, the book itself is from 1997, and in fact is one of the more well-loved ones of his entire career. A gentle character-based comedy about life among academes in a small college town, like Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and Jane Smiley's Moo it takes the self-reflective topic of writing professors on a closed campus (usually a no-no in writing guides for beginners) and embraces it for all it's worth, really delving into the quirky little details that come specifically with academic life, but spicing it up with enough interesting plot developments to make it much more than the usual piece of circle-jerking masturbation than the "writing professor writing about writing professors" subgenre usually produces. And of course, in this case things are helped immensely as well by the main character being such a fascinatingly complex and charming curmudgeon, an aging fiction professor who has long ago accepted his fate at the third-tier podunk college where they all gossip and backbite, and who in his very mild way has decided to rage against the machine which is campus pettiness, combining a world-weary attitude with occasional bursts of M*A*S*H-style outrageous actions, including his habit of playing the Motley Fool whenever in front of the local media just to stir up more crap for his overlords on the school's board of directors. I usually have a low tolerance for this kind of metafictional material, but again like Wonder Boys and Moo this is a rare exception, expressly because Russo takes the time and energy to put together a wonderfully entertaining, sometimes legitimately thrilling story to take place in this environment, instead of the usual endless whiny screeds about middle-aged men having affairs with their 19-year-old students. It comes hugely recommended, and makes me even more excited than I was to finally tackle his Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls for the CCLaP 100 later this year.
—Jason Pettus
I remember almost nothing about Richard Russo's Straight Man. I imagine I laughed a couple of times, and I think I enjoyed the reading experience, but there is only one specific thing that I remember from the book itself. More on that later, though, because I want to talk about the peripheral things I remember about Straight Man.I remember reading it for a Literary Theory class (my first class at my new University) with one of my all time favourite profs, Dr. W---. He admitted, very early into the book, that he hadn't read it before. His wife is a librarian, you see, and he always let her pick a wild card book for whichever class he happened to be teaching, something she was sure he'd like, something she thought would be appropriate. She picked Straight Man because Dr. W--- was the chair of an English Dept. in a seriously underfunded university where he played chief negotiator and neutral observer to a pack of bickering tenured maniacs. He apologized for the choice, realizing that it wasn't the best book to apply literary theory too, but he kept using it and did a damn fine job.Meanwhile, in the back of the classroom, I made friends with a wonderful woman named MM (you didn't think I was going to give her complete name did you? What's the fun in that?). She was in her early fifties, a southern belle of the old school, and I discovered that she was also the secretary of the English Dept. She audited a class every semester, just for fun, and Dr. W---'s class was her freebie. Why is this important? Well, MM took a liking to me, recommended me to Dr. W---, and I found myself as the Grad Assistant for the next two years, and that's where I met a woman, the Undergrad Assistant, who I loved deeply and passionately.Furthermore, every time I've taken a pee in a public restroom (since I read the book over a decade ago) I have had a mindflash of the main character, HD, comparing the power of his stream to the young bucks that pee next to him. I can't take a public pee without thinking of the book, nor can I take a public pee without comparing my stream with whomever's around. And sadly, my stream doesn't have the power it used to. Now I worry about kidney stones and prostate exams and future erectile dysfunction, and all because this damned book has made the power of my stream a permanent obsession (and in case you're wondering, this is the ONE specific thing I remember from Straight Man). What the hell is up with that?!As for what I think about Straight Man...well...who cares? I doubt Russo would care what I think, even if he knew me. What matters, at least what I think should matter, is that just the sight of Straight Man's cover, that cheesy red thing with the drake (or is it a gander?) brings back memories of Dr. W---, MM and that girl. And every pee I take calls to mind that cheesy red cover with the gander (or is it a drake?). That's gotta be good enough for any author.Shit...it would be for me.
—Brad
