A Good Academic Novel

Over the years I’ve read a fair number of academic novels. Examples come to mind by Jane Smiley, Bernard Malamud, Vladimir Nabokov, David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, and C. P. Snow, just to name half a dozen. Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997) is as good as any of them.

            Almost fifty, stuck in a regional state university in a small town in Pennsylvania,

William Henry Devereaux, Jr. is the interim chair of English, treated with suspicion by his colleagues, even though he would like to shield their incompetence from the administration, while he’s treated with uncomprehending lassitude by the students he tries to provoke to stand up for themselves, to coax into using a little reason, and in his fiction workshop, to protect themselves from their own gaucheness: “always understate necrophilia,” he says to his worst writer, who doesn’t. At least two of his fellow faculty members have physically attacked him. He insulates himself from the knocks while trying everyone’s patience with his jokes. He likes to take advantage of the fact that his paranoid, hyper-sensitive colleagues can’t seem to say anything that doesn’t tee up a comic line from him—everybody’s a straight man. But Hank’s humor isn’t masking depression or despair. He’s a happy man, when he stops to realize it, though he’s under a good deal of pressure.

            One of the repeating motifs is Hank’s fondness for William of Occam and his famous razor: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. He even has a dog named Occam. But as the administration threatens drastic budget cuts and faculty firings, Hank’s life is anything but simple, and he becomes a media star, the villain of campus protest groups, and a phantom of the Modern Languages Building, skulking around above the ceiling tiles. Another repeated motif is Hank’s line, with varying epithets filling in the blank: “I’m not a --------, but I can play that role.” The Guardian reviewer Tom Cox ends his review, “Richard Russo might not be an acknowledged master of the campus novel, but he can definitely play that role.”