SOURCE: Ingalls, Zoë. “A Novelist Finds Humor in Academic Woes.” Chronicle of Higher Education 43, no. 48 (8 August 1997): B8-B9.

[In the following essay, Ingalls discusses the publication of Straight Man and Russo's use of his own experiences in the academic world as fictional material.]

Richard Russo says his first attempt to write fiction wasn't just unsuccessful, “it was wretched.” You can picture him holding his nose at the other end of the phone. He's in Denver, on the first leg of a three-week, cross-country tour to promote his fourth and latest novel, Straight Man.

“It was not only bad,” he continues. “Almost anybody can write a bad story. But it was bad and pretentious.”

The pretension he attributes to being in the throes of a dissertation in English at the time. Only someone in such a position could write something that “exquisitely, painfully off,” he says. “It exhibits a person without the least skill or imagination, but convinced of his own brilliance.”

Some 20 years later, Dr. Russo, 48, has more than made up for his youthful hubris. His first three novels, Mohawk (1986), The Risk Pool (1988), and Nobody's Fool (1993), were published to favorable reviews, and Nobody's Fool was made into a movie, starring Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy.

Straight Man, released by Random House last month, focuses on academic life at the mythical West Central Pennsylvania University, a third-rate state institution in a backwater town that has gone nowhere since the railroad packed up and left a half-century ago. Dr. Russo, who spent nearly 25 years teaching at institutions including Arizona State University and Colby College before turning to writing full time, has put his intimate acquaintance with the follies and foibles of academe to good use. The New York Times Book Review described Straight Man as “the funniest serious novel” since Portnoy's Complaint.

At the center of the book is Hank Devereaux, 49-year-old interim chairman of the English department, whose members are constantly at odds. Rumors of imminent budget cuts and layoffs exacerbate the petty squabbling.

Hank is an unrepentant smart aleck, a man unable to resist the flippant comeback or irreverent putdown. Lately though, he has entered a midlife crisis, and his behavior has taken on a reckless perversity.

He teases the department's poet, who slams her spiral notebook into his face and snags his nostril with the tip of the spiral wire. He provokes the university's administration by appearing on the 11 o'clock news in false nose and glasses, brandishing a live goose and promising to “kill a duck a day” until he gets his budget (see excerpt, this page).

As a result of his behavior, Hank is thrown in jail, lands in the hospital, and is nearly ousted as interim chairman with only two weeks to go in the semester. (All the while he is attempting to deal with his daughter's marital difficulties, his suspicion that his wife is having an affair with the dean, and a recalcitrant urinary-tract disorder.)

“English departments are very funny places,” says Dr. Russo, “and one of the things difficult about it is you're not allowed to laugh.”

“I was able in this book to show a man who doesn't really care anymore. He is going to laugh when people are the most funny, when people are the most envious, when people are the most petty, when people are the most territorial and the most academic. They're very funny, but they don't know it.”

Dr. Russo has lined up a supporting cast of characters easily recognizable in academe. They include Billy Quigley, a drunkard who demands summer sessions and course overloads to help pay the tuition loans for his 10 children; Tony Coniglia, who makes it a rule never to sleep with undergraduates until his final grades are in; and Campbell Wheemer, four years out of graduate school at Brown University and so politically correct that in a departmental meeting he urges his colleagues to vote against him, a white male, when he comes up for tenure. “If we in the English department don't take a stand against sexism, who will?” he asks, on the verge of tears.

He cannot resist inserting “or she” into the conversation every time someone uses a masculine pronoun. It's gotten so bad that his colleagues have taken to calling him “Orshee.”

No wonder Hank finds himself repeating, like some sort of mantra, his observation that “the serious competition in an English department is for the role of straight man.”

Dr. Russo's own long acquaintance with English departments began in 1967, when he left his hometown of Gloversville, in upstate New York, to attend the University of Arizona. He received a bachelor's degree in English there in 1971 and stayed to earn a doctorate in 1979 and a master's of fine arts in 1980.

Dr. Russo taught at Arizona State University, Pennsylvania State University at Altoona, Southern Connecticut State University, and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale before going to Colby in 1992. He was a professor of English and creative writing there for four years before giving himself over to fiction.

This fall, Magic Hour [released as Twilight], a detective movie for which he wrote the screenplay, will be released. It stars Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, and James Garner. Dr. Russo is now at work on adapting Straight Man to the screen.

Creating and peopling new worlds, whether in academe or hardscrabble towns in upstate New York, are feats that Dr. Russo says he learned from writers he admires: Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, among others. He identifies more closely with 19th-century writers than with many contemporary authors, he says. “I really like the sense you get of knowing the rhythms of life in a particular place, the sense that you could be dropped down in a village and know exactly where you were and exactly what is going on. I miss that in contemporary fiction.”

Most of his characters seem so real, it's hard to believe that they are not. He acknowledges parallels between his own life and those of his characters—“only some of which I would be willing to talk about,” he jokes.

“For virtually every character, I can envision being sued by at least six different people,” he says with a laugh. “I've had people read my books and swear to me a character was based on somebody I knew [but] turned out to be somebody I never met.”

In fact, he says, his characters are more often than not composites, combining traits from various people who have caught his eye. “I'm incapable of telling the truth about anybody for very long in fiction,” he says. “I take a character and start telling lies and embellishing. Hopefully, what ends up in the final draft on the page is a new character with certain traits that might be traceable, but I don't think there's anything in this that any person need be offended by.”

Indeed, Dr. Russo's former colleagues at Southern Illinois find the novel anything but offensive, says John M. Howell, chairman of the English department, who hired him.

“Everybody's sort of looking for bits and pieces” of reality in the fiction and discovering them “here and there,” Dr. Howell says. “He's synthesized various characters and conflated events—moved them into new contexts. It's essentially a very kind novel. Not vicious, as so many academic novels are.”

“I know the provost enjoyed it,” Dr. Howell adds. “He was the dean of the college at the time Rick was here. We've all had a lot of laughs.”

A recurring theme in Dr. Russo's fiction is the relationship between parents and child. In Straight Man, Hank's high jinks can be read as one way of coming to terms with the emotional baggage created by an icily distant father. William Henry Devereaux, Sr., made a name for himself writing trendy books in literary criticism. “This was the fifties, and for him, New Criticism was already old,” Hank observes. His father parlayed his fame into a series of appointments as a distinguished visiting professor. “Duration of visit, a year or two at most, perhaps because it's hard to remain distinguished among people who know you.”

A better scholar than he is a father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., eventually abandons his wife and son to run off with a student in his D. H. Lawrence seminar. “Since then, he's taken up with a Brontë woman and a Joseph Conrad woman, before finally coming a cropper with Virginia Woolf,” Hank observes.

Like so much of the humor in Straight Man, Hank's statement has an underlying layer of sadness—a sort of reverse silver lining.

Dr. Russo says this is something he learned from reading Dickens—“that I would be the kind of writer who would want to deal in the same work with the darkest human impulses and the most comic, which are often closely allied. My work has gotten funnier, I think, over the course of my career, but also pretty dark.

“I'm sure I learned that from Dickens—that the funniest stuff and the saddest, most sorrowful, can coexist most happily.”