[In the following review, Bradfield judges Straight Man to be a humorous but flawed novel.]

Hank Devereaux, the protagonist of Richard Russo's funny and clever novel, [Straight Man,] is a professor of creative writing, hiding out in the below-par English Department of West Central Pennsylvania University, and he doesn't think he belongs anywhere better. About to turn fifty, he hasn't written a book in the twenty years since he received tenure, and he has been elected Department Chair solely because he is the sort of “militant procedural incompetent” who doesn't threaten to get anything done. In a department of losers, nobody wants to be left behind by somebody else's accomplishments. And, in an era of increasingly stringent budget cuts, accomplishing nothing is starting to look easier and easier.

Russo's portrait of the Department Wars in today's literary academy is sharp. First, there is the Old Guard, a lot of fifty-something professors who get along by doing as little as possible, and inventing reasons not to talk to one another. Then, there is the thin and stroppy Young Guard, which now consists solely of Campbell Wheemer, a specialist in French feminism, cultural studies, and postmodern American sitcoms, who is so afraid of being deemed “logocentric” that he avoids reading books whenever possible. Everybody is more concerned with establishing territories than in sharing knowledge.

As Department Chair, Devereaux cannot hire adjunct or replacement faculty until the university gives him money, and the university can't give him money until it doesn't have any other choice. So when Devereaux encounters a stray news-crew lurking around the university duck pond, he grabs the noisiest fowl in the vicinity, and threatens to “kill a duck a day until I get a budget”. He doesn't mind the fact that the bird happens to be a goose. Nor does he take his threat so seriously as to make good on it. But, when he's not looking, somebody else does.

Straight Man is a funny novel; but somewhere around the middle pages, the thin plot starts to unravel, and scenes grow overly long and diffuse. Russo sets up some intriguing premises—the conflict between unions and administration, husbands and wives, stern fathers and yearning sons—but he never tries to resolve any of them. Like many of his male characters, he seems to be arguing that we don't ever get anywhere in our lives, and neither do the stories we try to make of ourselves. As a philosophy, it's an intriguing notion. But as a method for producing fiction, it doesn't completely satisfy.