Richard Russo, Straight Man
Bob Newhart has been an extremely funny comedian for decades, but in all of his situation comedies he was the straight man. The humor came in his reactions to the zany behavior of other characters. That's sort of the situation in Richard Russo's 1997 novel Straight Man.William Henry Devereaux Jr., son of a noted literary critic who abandoned his family years ago for a series of sexy students, is himself a professor of literature, temporarily made the department chairman despite his reputation on the faculty for a lack of seriousness. Yet on this faculty he is the Newhart, the one who observes and reacts to the strangeness and silliness going on around him.
Other faculty members are much like him, someone who came to this small Pennsylvania college as a promising young scholar and now realizes his career has nowhere to go. He got his position in the first place on the strength of a first novel, but there has never been a second. He's bored teaching writing to students with little writing talent, but he has tenure. He discovers his secretary, with whom he is half in love (affection for spouses and others is given percentages in this novel) is a better writer than he is.
Devereaux finds himself the department head at a time of threatened budget cuts and the possibility of staff reductions. Other English professors are convinced Devereaux has their names on a list of those to be axed, while the dean pressures him to make such a list. Meanwhile his daughter's marriage reaches a crisis, his wife has gone away on business and he wonders if she will ever return, a handyman is in love with his difficult mother and then his father, now aged and repenting only of misjudging Charles Dickens, returns home.
Russo has a gift for writing hilarious serious novels, and Straight Man is one such novel. Its pleasures are many.
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