[In the following review, Lee asserts that Russo joins the ranks of several modern authors who satirize academia—Kingsley Amis, John Barth, and Jane Smiley, among others—with the publication of Straight Man.]

No contemporary institution has felt the bite of novelistic parody and ridicule more keenly and more frequently than has academia. From Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim and John Barth's End of the Road in the 1950s to David Lodge's more recent novels and Jane Smiley's Moo, the academy has been laid bare in the comic mode with far more regularity than the military, the law, science or even Madison Avenue.

While some would suggest that this is because the university has become a parody of itself, the more obvious explanation is that parody is an inside job, and there are more novelists hanging around English departments than in corner offices or emergency rooms—novelists who aren't pleased to see colleagues teaching students to deconstruct the work they spend their lives constructing.

With Straight Man, Richard Russo joins company with Amis, Barth, Lodge and Smiley. Set in the ideologically embattled, budgetarily strained and personality-conflicted English department of West Central Pennsylvania University, this truly funny book takes the usual easy shots at the postmodernists feminists, deconstructionists, cultural theorists and self-inflated egotists, all of whom are already so caricatured in the media that one hardly needs a talented novelist to do the job. But Russo is capable of heavy lifting as well.

He uses the chaos of an academic department under budgetary pressure from without and lacking a core of integrity within to represent the larger chaos we know as the contemporary world. West Central Pennsylvania University is an apt comic metaphor for all kinds of institutions wrestling with whatever passes for “soul” while simultaneously trying to deal with the challenge of survival in a budget-driven world run by downsizing specialists.

Russo's narrator/protagonist, William Henry Devereaux Jr., fast approaching 50 and suffering from a chronic urinary problem intransigent enough to “even diminish the power of literature,” is acting chair of an English department on the verge of self-deconstruction. A teacher of fiction writing who hasn't written any fiction in 20 years, Devereaux knows in his heart that academic tenure has made him into “deadwood,” as it has most of his colleagues. Devereaux is the cynical son of a man who in his day personified the academic literary life (Devereaux Sr., the “father of American literary theory,” abdicated his role as father of the 9-year-old Henry by running away with a graduate student from his D. H. Lawrence seminar). Devereaux vents his cynicism and disdain for his father and for academia in an irony-laden newspaper column he writes under the pseudonym of Lucky Hank (a tip of the hat to Kingsley Amis). The column is titled “The Soul of the University.”

Devereaux is assailed by members of the department who accuse him of conspiring with the dean to purge their ranks, and both threatened and tempted by the college president to do exactly that. And Hank finds himself the center of national media attention when he jokingly threatens to kill “a duck a day” from the campus pond until the university budget is handed down intact. No one seems to get the joke, and the novel approaches farce when dead ducks actually begin to appear on campus, victims of a mysterious assassin who attracts simultaneously the ire of animal rights activists and the applause of the faculty union.

Henry Devereaux reminds his class that “all good stories start with character,” and it is here that Russo has triumphed by populating his novel with a rich mix of many hilariously drawn caricatures and three or four characters with real depth. They range from a stereotypically alcoholic professor of Irish literature; to a male “feminist critical theory and image-oriented culture” specialist who announces that he has “no interest in literature per se” and who claims that his white maleness should have precluded him from being hired by his sexist department; to Devereaux Sr., the quintessential “academic opportunist,” whose girlfriends are identified by the seminars he headed (the Virginia Woolf girl, the Joseph Conrad girl, the D. H. Lawrence girl); to the couple who collaborate on an article about “clitoral imagery in Emily Dickinson,” the woman “being herself in possession of a clitoris and therefore more sensitive to its encoded appearances” and the man making use of “his up-to-date critical theory vocabulary”; to the college's sleazy Machiavellian president.

These minor characters entertain us without causing us to think too seriously about the extent to which Russo may or may not be advancing a right-of-center critique of academic culture. It he is doing so, the novelistic wolf is much less convincing than the sheep's clothing it inhabits.

While the comic plot and cast of zany characters of Straight Man entertain us, the character and the voice of William Henry Devereaux will make the book memorable. Devereaux is Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim with tenure, which is his very problem. Not wanting to be like his father (“confused, abstracted, disappointed when jolted out of book like into real life”), Hank has discovered after 15 years of tenured life that perhaps he's inherited more from his father than kidney stones and a taste for tweed jackets and button-down Oxford shirts.

Hearing a rumor that he might be on the department hit list, he feels a stirring he can't quite name: “What I'm really at a loss to explain is the odd thrill that the rumor might be true. But I also remember the look of excitement in Teddy's eyes when he brought the matter up at the Civic. Could it be that we two middle-aged men are so hungry for something to happen to us?” This hunger expresses itself in a four-day spree of perverse behavior aimed at making that “something” happen and thereby jeopardizing the cozy career that for Hank has actually been more a soul-draining trap.

As a writer, albeit a failed one, and as a teacher of literature, Henry Devereaux knows he will always be in danger of becoming like his father, for whom “relatively few experiences of his life (excepting carnal ones) did not originate on the printed page.” This knowledge leads to a kind of comic self-loathing that expresses itself in a steady stream of English-department wit with a nasty twist born of ironic distance from just about everyone around him (with occasional dispensations granted his wife and daughter).

This double-consciousness, this ability to offer reams of flippant commentary on everyone and everything around him, while at the same time acknowledging the shallowness of a life quickly becoming pathetic because it lacks principle and purpose, makes Hank a very funny man. But the fact that he knows the joke is at his own expense—that he is his own “straight man”—makes Henry Devereaux a full-fledged comic antihero. Add to the mix the character's acute sense of mortality—powerfully evoked in two scenes in particular (one a memory of Mrs. Devereaux's tearful reaction to her 9-year-old son's suicide attempt, the other a flashback to Henry's own tearful response to his daughter's bicycle accident)—and you have a seriously comic version of a world that in the final analysis is worth living in, with or without tenure; early John Barth without the nihilism.

For those of us who work in English departments, Straight Man will not fit Jonathan Swift's definition of satire as “a kind of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.” We are all here, discoverable in one or another of these characters. But because William Henry Devereaux Jr. outgrows his “Lucky Hank” persona, the voice of this novel will speak to a much larger body of readers, academics or otherwise, and it is a voice wonderfully worth listening to for its pathos and genuine humanity as much as for its abundant cleverness.