''We have believed, all of us, like Scuffy the Tugboat,'' he says, ''that we were made for better things.'' But while committee work, departmental politics,Īnnual budget cuts, puny raises and ''the increasingly militant ignorance'' of students have soured and embittered his fellow academics, Hank refuses to sing the professorial blues, to participate in feuds, to bedĪny students or to curry favor with Dickie Pope, the oily and malignant campus executive officer. Like most of his tenured colleagues, he is amazed still to be ensconced at West Central Pennsylvania Strikes me as the funniest serious novel I have read since - well, maybe since ''Portnoy's Complaint.''Ĭomfortably, if complacently, married, and the father of two grown daughters, Hank Devereaux is a midcareer academic a month shy of his 50th birthday. The author of the novels ''Mohawk,'' ''The Risk Pool'' and ''Nobody's Fool,'' is interested in more than generating laughter, and ''Straight Man'' Stick a wisenheimer like him in a dour, paranoid college English department (has there ever been another kind?) and comedy can practically be guaranteed. can never swallow a quip or a saucy comeback, nor does he try to. He narrator of Richard Russo's hilarious fourth novel is a man whom nearly everyone finds exasperating. More on Richard Russo from The New York Times Archives. Richard Russo's satirical novel takes place at a jerkwater college in Pennsylvania
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