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Review by Roger Miller
Richard Russo has got to start writing faster.
That's the sort of unbuckled enthusiasm that serious reviewers, to demonstrate their seriousness, are supposed to disdain, but I can't help it. "Straight Man" is only his fourth novel in 10 years, and that's just not good enough. Whatever it is the man is doing when not writing, he has got to stop.
Until he realizes his obligation to suffering humanity, we will have to be satisfied with "Straight Man," which is no hardship, because it satisfies completely. It is classic Russo in all but two respects: It is not set in a fictional patch of the author's native upstate New York and it is not populated by lower-middle-class, blue-collar people, as were "Nobody's Fool," "The Risk Pool" and "Mohawk."
This time Russo shifts to a fictional patch of Pennsylvania, a worn-at-the-heels town called Railton ("There is no bad side of the tracks in Railton. Also no good side."), populated largely by third-rate academics who teach (or fail to) at the equally fictional and equally third-rate West Central Pennsylvania University.
Aside from that we're in familiar Russo territory. There is even a character named Teddy who could be the intellectual twin of the totally unintellectual Rub Squeers of "Nobody's Fool": Both are hapless, hopeless and absolutely ineffectual and both are close to their books' respective main characters. Teddy is the sometime friend of William Henry Devereaux Jr., also known as Hank, the reluctant chairman of the English department and the novel's first-person narrator.
I say "sometime friend" because friendships are fragile among these unhappy campers. Nearly everyone has filed at least one grievance against someone else, and all are on edge because they fear losing their jobs if the legislature cuts funding. (Academics, Hank thinks, "indulge paranoid fantasies for the same reason dogs lick their own testicles.")
Hank is not unhappy, but neither is he quite happy. He loves his wife, Lily, and she loves him, but somehow they don't click. He suffers from a urinary impediment that is clearly a stand-in for some other sort of blockage, perhaps involving his long-absent father, a famed literary theorist and fornicator.
No, bemused might be a better word for Hank, as he observes academic infighting and his own domestic disturbances -- both, when you get right down to it, fairly petty. He writes a column for the local newspaper in which he mocks college life and signs it "Lucky Hank." This, though unstated by Russo, is plainly a reference to that greatest of all campus novels, Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim." Indeed, Hank does in several ways resemble Amis's derisive hero, especially in the ironic distance he keeps.
The title derives from Hank's frequent comment, "In English departments the most serious competition is for the role of straight man," a notion that Russo -- his single flaw -- never adequately develops or clarifies. A more obvious, though admittedly infelicitous, title might have been "Occam's Razor," a concept that Hank raises so often as to make it a theme.
The reference is to William of Occam, a fourteenth-century English theologian whose famous "razor," or principle of economy in logic, maintains that "entities [assumptions used to explain phenomena] should not be multiplied beyond what is needed."
In Hank's treatment this gets reduced or diffused to a general idea of simplicity in all things. He calls himself a disciple of William and says that, like William and like physicists, "I'm seeking a unifying theory."
If he manages to find one, it's tucked away obscurely toward the back of the book: "Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own." Not so much William of Occam, that -- more like Graham Greene.
Well, I see I've managed to make such heavy weather of the book as almost to distort its nature. I haven't adequately shown how continually funny it is, and frequently hilarious -- most notably when Hank, waving a goose by the neck in front of TV cameras, threatens to kill a duck a day until he gets a departmental budget. Nor have I shown how tightly choreographed it is, one event clicking into place after the other, as neatly as a Model T in a Keystone Kops movie zipping across the tracks in front of a barreling locomotive.
But they're there, just as they are in his three earlier novels. Already I wish there were a fifth one.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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