My wife picked up Richard Russo’s 1997 novel “Straight Man” for a Father’s Day present without too much foresight. She knew I would like a book, and she knew that I generally eat up books which focus on a male character besieged by a severe case of arrested development.
William Henry Devereaux Jr. certainly fits that description and his antics as the reluctant interim chair of the English department at a Pennsylvania university made him even more appealing to me.
Give me a guy who passive-aggressively insults his colleagues, drinks too much and threatens to kill a duck a day until he gets a departmental budget any day of the week for my literary entertainment.
When Maria gave me the book, she said the note on the front about Russo‘s Pulitzer Prize, which he won in 2002 for “Empire Falls,” helped her with the choice. That worked out great because Russo’s inherent skill as a writer allows him to satirize the academic world in which he lived in at the time while not going completely over the top.
Sure, the thought of Devereaux climbing into the rafters to avoid detection by the colleagues planning to vote him out of his leadership position might sound far-fetched, but the story to that point had painted him in such a corner, the idea did not sound that far-fetched.
That kind of character development makes “Straight Man” stand out. The humanity behind the insanity makes Russo’s book a gem for anyone who has endured the insanity of higher education.