Richard Russo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who is one of the most universally acclaimed authors of the generation. But neither of these facts led me to buy this book; the title, Straight Man, would have made me laugh in third grade, so I picked it up.
The novel follows William Henry Deveraux Jr - who goes by Hank - a judgmental and elitist English professor at a college in Pennsylvania, and his adventures over the course of an insane week. The school's money is tighter than ever, and his divided colleagues wonder where his allegiances lie; his wife, the woman he desperately depends on, is gone, interviewing for a job in Philadelphia; pressures from higher up in the school's food chain to be promoted or fire members from the English department; his father, namesake and focus of resentment, is coming home to stay with his wife, Hank's holier-than-thou mother; and Hank comes under serious pressure after threatening to kill a goose on television - and a goose ends up dead.
Apparently they don't give out them there Pulitzers for nothing, because Russo does an excellent job of keeping control of these numerous threads. The plot moves smoothly from one moment to the next, with Hank's reflections while attempting to urinate (he believes he's passing kidney stones) often serving as a segue. There are well-crafted elements of satire in here, primarily aimed at the dysfunctional workings of universities. He also slips in a few jabs at animal rights activists and local television, although not serious jabs. All in all, the content is fairly safe, but is also wickedly hilarious, even the premise alone.
But while the plot and its various twists and turns are amusing, the true humor in this book is found with the cast of characters, each one of them vibrant, different, realistic, and side-splitting in their behavior. Hank himself is, as I said, an overcritical and apathetic man, and his commentary on events just passed are often some of the funniest. The English department is filled with an assortment of hilariously odd characters which help this book come alive: from Orshee, a man who shows sitcoms in class to replace texts, doesn't permit his students to write, and would have been anything besides a white man, "politically and morally speaking, had the choice been his"; to Gracie, a failed poet and former beauty who has let herself go in recent years, hiding her shame in perfume; to the funniest character in the book, Tony Coniglia, an incredibly brash and competitive man in his mid-fifties who never ceases to turn something into a competition. Here is a conversation between the two, following a one-sided racquetball game:
"There's nothing mysterious about what women want," Tony informs me. "They want everything. Just like us. What's interesting is what they'll settle for. What's interesting is that often they'll settle for me." He pauses to let me contemplate this mystery. "I don't know if they'd settle for you," he adds.
"Well--" I begin.
"The intensity of the orgasm isn't there anymore," Tony concedes, as if he's anticipated that I'm about to register this objection. "My first time was when I was thirteen, in Brooklyn. There was a woman who lived in our building. She invited me up one afternoon. I had this incredible orgasm standing in the middle of her living room before she could get out of her brassiere."
"I'm not sure that qualifies as fornication."
"That was my brother's position," Tony says. "When I told him about it, he set me straight. I even went back to the woman and apologized."
"Did she accept it?"
"Accept what?" Tony says. "If you're going to be careless with pronouns, we're going to have to talk about something else. Fornication requires precision."
"Not to mention patience," I add.
"Not to mention skill and stamina and affection," Tony continues. "Not to mention other things you're too young to understand. But in answer to your question, she did accept it, after all, quite graciously."
The book is consistently great until the last fifty pages or so, when it really slows down and comes to a conventional close. Considering how wild and unpredictable most of the rest of the novel is, the ending was a disappointment, and left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.
This is truly the one and only flaw with this work, which is both funny and inventive, and definitely a book that just about anybody will enjoy if they give it a chance.
Grade: 8.5/10
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