Understanding Richard Russo

Chapter 5: Straight Man

chapter 5 Straight Man In a 1999 article for the New York Times magazine, Richard Russo explained that while on his Straight Man book tour, the most common question he encountered was how much he had exaggerated his portrayal of academic life. “By the end of the tour,” he recounted, “I had my deadpan response down pat: ‘What exaggeration?’ If the depiction of lunacy happens to be your goal, academic life requires no embellishment. . . . The challenge, rather, is to tone things down sufficiently so that generous readers outside the academy will find the events credible.”1 Russo certainly had ample time to become well acquainted with the “lunacy” of higher education; his career in academia began in graduate school at the University of Arizona and included teaching positions at Pennsylvania State University–Altoona, Southern Connecticut State University, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and, finally , Colby College. His career as an English professor allowed him to draw from his own firsthand experiences with department squabbles, incompetent administrators, ever-looming budget cuts, and marginally prepared students. All of these come into play in Straight Man, Russo’s only academic satire and a work he considers his “long goodbye to the academy.”2 Straight Man marks a dramatic departure from Russo’s first three novels, all of which are set in upstate New York and take as subjects the struggles of working-class men in deteriorating factory towns. Straight Man, in contrast, takes place in the invented rural town of Railton, Pennsylvania, and focuses on Professor Henry William “Hank” Devereaux Jr., a middle-aged English professor at the fictional West Central Pennsylvania University. Departing from his more familiar setting of crumbling tanneries and poisoned streams, Russo instead provides a similarly modest but quite different world of an undistinguished regional state university in a town where the geography seems STRAIGHT MAN 57 dominated by run-down rail yards, grungy bars, and various competing subdivisions , one of which, Allegheny Wells, is home to Hank and his family. As an academic satire, Straight Man falls on a long and rich continuum of works dealing with the foibles of academic life. The earliest example of an American campus novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe (1828), was not particularly successful, but the campus novel quickly gained momentum as a popular genre. By the first decades of the twentieth century, best-selling works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) and Percy Marks’s The Plastic Age (1924) helped to define youth culture for a general reading audience. Until about the middle of the twentieth century, most campus novels focused primarily on the experiences of students attending university. After World War II, however, academic novels began to divert attention toward the lives of faculty, and critics often cite Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952), Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution (1953), and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1953) as three early touchstones of this focal shift. More recently the emphasis on faculty in academic novels has, in many cases, zeroed in even more specifically on tenure and the ramifications of the tenure process. Straight Man falls clearly into this subgenre. In fact Eric Leuschner comments, “Richard Russo’s Straight Man has in many ways become the heir to Amis’s Lucky Jim as the contemporary exemplar of the academic novel with its intertwining of budget concerns, tenure problems , and theory wars.”3 Russo even nods to Amis’s novel through Hank’s nom de plume for his local newspaper op-ed pieces, “Lucky Hank.” Straight Man appeared amid a flurry of other academic novels in the 1990s; many of these, as Elaine Showalter notes in Faculty Towers (2005), “satirized this new cast of characters and their struggles for tenure, status, and political correctness; the tone of these books is much more vituperative, vengeful, and cruel than in earlier decades.”4 Russo’s comic touch manages to dilute most elements of cruelty or vengefulness into gentle humor, but Straight Man does offer plenty of digs at the pretentiousness and self-importance of faculty members mired in the petty politics of university life. Upon its release in 1997, Straight Man was widely and positively reviewed ; the New York Times reviewer Tom De Haven commented admiringly that it was “the funniest serious novel I have read since—well, maybe since ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’” De Haven continued, “The novel’s greatest pleasures derive not from any blazing impatience to see what happens next, but from pitch-perfect...