First Jane Smiley came out of the comedy closet with Moo, a campus satire par excellence, and now Richard Russo has gotten in on the groves-of-academe game. Straight Man is hilarious sport, with a serious side. William Henry Devereaux Jr., is almost 50 and stuck forever as chair of English at West Central Pennsylvania University. It is April and fear of layoffs--even among the tenured--has reached mock-epic proportions; Hank has yet to receive his department budget and finds himself increasingly offering comments such as "Always understate necrophilia" to his writing students. Then there are his possible prostate problems and the prospect of his father's arrival. Devereaux Sr., "then and now, an academic opportunist," has always been a high-profile professor and a low-profile parent.

Though Hank tries to apply William of Occam's rational approach (choose simplicity) to each increasingly absurd situation, and even has a dog named after the philosopher, he does seem to cause most of his own enormous difficulties. Not least when he grabs a goose and threatens to off a duck (sic) a day until he gets his budget. The fact that he is also wearing a fake nose and glasses and doing so in front of a TV camera complicates matters even further. Hank tries to explain to one class that comedy and tragedy don't go together, but finds the argument "runs contrary to their experience. Indeed it may run contrary to my own." It runs decidedly against Richard Russo's approach in Straight Man, and the result is a hilarious and touching novel.


From Library Journal
Hank Devereaux Jr. is the kind of guy who turns anything serious into a joke. Pushing 50, he's the interim chair of a squabbling English department at a small rural college. Big budget cuts are rumored. Each department chair has been told to provide a list of those who will lose their jobs. His department believes that Hank has prepared such a list, but he hasn't and won't. Instead, he goes on television and spontaneously jokes that he will kill the campus geese until the administration gives him his budget. When a goose really is killed, Hank becomes the prime suspect. In his earlier novels (e.g., Nobody's Fool, LJ 4/15/93), Russo captured with compassion and humor the lives of the people in small backwater towns; now he does the same for those who inhabit the groves of academe. This novel is filled with laughter but also much seriousness. Give it a straight A.?Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Tom De Haven
Russo, the author of the novels Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody's Fool, is interested in more than generating laughter, and Straight Man strikes me as the funniest serious novel I have read since--well, maybe since Portnoy's Complaint.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Thomas Curwen
He's a Raymond Carver without the grunge, a funny Richard Ford and, on the not-so venerable campus of WCPU, an American Kingsley Amis, and in Straight Man, with his leisurely pacing, deliberate dialogue and keen eye for details, he shows that realism and farce are not distant cousins, that absurdity can be successfully mined from the ordinary events of an ordinary life without diminishing its humor and truth.


From AudioFile
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Russo (EMPIRE FALLS) is known for delving into the hearts and minds of working-class heroes. This title, uncharacteristically, ventures into the world of academia, but maintains Russo's interest in the working man's struggle. His protagonist is an English instructor at a second-rate college. Sadly, the recording is dreadfully miscast. Freed's reading of the narrator's workday frustrations fails to communicate the humor of even the funniest moments. While Russo's work is known for its comedy, in Freed's hands his conflicted character comes off as self-important and self-absorbed. Russo's story captures well the old saw: "Why are academic politics so cut-throat? Because the stakes are so small." But small stakes don't often make for a good story. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Hank Devereaux was voted interim chair of the English department at a Pennsylvania college based on his loudly voiced contempt for bureaucratic procedures. Long mired in old grievances and thwarted ambitions, the contentious English faculty figure they can count on Hank to do absolutely nothing, thereby preserving the status quo. They figured wrong. Perpetual wise guy Hank has managed to stir things up on all fronts: he's goaded the reigning campus poetess into gouging him with a spiral notebook, bringing the faculty meeting to a screeching halt as the janitor attempts to remove the offending notebook from his nose; he's been broadcast on all the early-morning TV shows, while wearing a Groucho Marx^-style fake nose and glasses, threatening to kill one of the ubiquitous campus ducks unless the administration releases his budget; and he's enraged both the administration and the union with his dearly held motto: A pox on both your houses. In the highly satisfying conclusion, a shakeout results in all the wiseacres being richly rewarded while the bean-counting bureaucrats are bounced. Leaving behind his trademark blue-collar milieu (Nobody's Fool [1993], made into a movie starring Paul Newman), Russo has lost none of his gifts for fashioning wry comedy, endearing characters, and an artful blend of high jinks and heartache. Like Michael Malone in Foolscap (1991), another rollicking academic satire, Russo proves himself a master of bighearted, old-fashioned storytelling. Joanne Wilkinson


From Kirkus Reviews
A gloriously funny and involving fourth novel from the author of such comfortable-as-old-shoes fictions as Mohawk (1986) and Nobody's Fool (1993). Writing teacher William Henry ``Hank'' Devereaux Jr. is a one- shot novelist (Off the Road) who's settled into an embattled stint as department head at an academic sinkhole where he finds it prudent to simply tread water and go with the flow (anyway, ``promotion in an institution like West Central Pennsylvania University was a little like being proclaimed the winner of a shit- eating contest''). Hank tries to keep his wits about him by adopting the philosophical principle known as Occam's Razor (that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon or problem is usually the correct one), but his life keeps getting in the way. A nearby married daughter is having husband trouble. The state legislature promises to eviscerate his departmental budget. Hank's ``crushes'' on various women, including a colleague's adult daughter, complicate his otherwise passive devotion to his no-nonsense wife Lily. And, in addition to possible prostate cancer, Hank is assailed by even more undignified woes: His nose is bloodied by a poet's notebook, and he's suspected (with good reason) of murdering a goose--and of even worse things--by a hilarious, vividly rendered cadre of fellow academics, townspeople, and students, each of whom is sharply individualized. Though the quests for tenure and priority are generously detailed, and though Hank's relationship with his long-absent father reaches a satisfying closure, plot is only secondary (or maybe tertiary or quaternary) in a Russo novel. This latest seduces and charms with its voice (i.e., Hank Devereaux's): Laconic, deadpan, disarmingly modest and self- effacing, it's the perfect vehicle for another of Russo's irresistible revelations of the agreeable craziness of everyday life. Besides, how can you not like a writing prof who counsels an overzealous student to ``Always understate necrophilia''? (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
In this uproarious new novel, Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak. Russo's protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character--he is a born anarchist-- and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.

In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. in short, Straight Man is classic Russo--side-splitting and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down.


From the Publisher
"Russo is a master craftsman ... The blue-collar heartache at the center of his fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving."
-- The Boston Globe"What makes Richard Russo so admirable as a novelist is that his natural grace as a storyteller is matched by his compassion for his characters."
-- John Irving"Russo proves himself a master at evoking the sights, feelings and smells of a town ... He has succeeded in creating characters with the emotional weight of people we've known in real life."
--The New York Times"After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life. And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are."
-- E. Annie Proulx"It's about time that people looking for a good read discovered the novels of Richard Russo."
-- Publisher's Weekly"Richard Russo's novel is as simple as family love, yet nearly as complicated."
-- San Francisco Chronicle"Self-knowledge, along with love in all its forms, from lifelong friendships to consuming sexual passions, is what this remarkably likable, beautifully written novel is all about."
-- Washington Post Book World"Funny, bighearted, resolutely untrendy, ultimately moving ... at once a delightful entertainment and a wise handbook for living."
-- New York Newsday


From the Inside Flap
In this uproarious new novel, Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak.  Russo's protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt.  Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character--he is a born anarchist-- and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.  

In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television.  All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions.  in short, Straight Man is classic Russo--side-splitting and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down.


From the Back Cover
The funniest serious novel I have read since--well, maybe since Portnoy's Complaint." --Tom De Haven, The New York Times Book Review

"There is a big, wry heart beating at the center of Russo's fiction." --The New Yorker

"[Russo] skewers academic pretensions and infighting with mad abandon . . . in a clear and muscular prose that is a pleasure to read. . . . I had to stop often to guffaw, gasp, wheeze, and wipe away my tears." --Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times

"Bursting with humor and insight." --USA Today


About the Author
Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He has written five novels: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls, and a collection of stories, The Whore’s Child.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter I

When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in. June, his wife, whose sense of self-worth is not easily tilted, drives a new Saab. "That seat goes back," Teddy says, observing that my knees are practically under my chin.

When we stop at an intersection for oncoming traffic, I run my fingers along the side of the seat, looking for the release. "It does, huh?"

"It's supposed to," he says, sounding academic, helpless.

I know it's supposed to, but I give up trying to make it, preferring the illusion of suffering. I'm not a guilt provoker by nature, but I can play that role. I release a theatrical sigh intended to convey that this is nonsense, that my long legs could be stretched out comfortably beneath the wheel of my own Lincoln, a car as ancient as Teddy's Civic, but built on a scale more suitable to the long-legged William Henry Devereauxs of the world, two of whom, my father and me, remain above ground.

Teddy is an insanely cautious driver, unwilling to goose his little Civic into a left turn in front of oncoming traffic. "The cars are spaced just wrong. I can't help it," he explains when he sees me grinning at him. Teddy's my age, forty-nine, and though his features are more boyish, he too is beginning to show signs of age. Never robust, his chest seems to have become more concave, which emphasizes his small paunch. His hands are delicate, almost feminine, hairless. His skinny legs appear lost in his trousers. It occurs to me as I study him that Teddy would have a hard time starting over-that is, learning how unfamiliar things work, competing, finding a mate. The business of young men. "Why would I have to start over?" he wants to know, a frightened expression deepening the lines around the corners of his eyes.

Apparently, to judge from the way he's looking at me now, I have spoken my thought out loud, though I wasn't aware of doing so. "Don't you ever wish you could?"

"Could what?" he says, his attention diverted. Having spied a break in the oncoming traffic, he takes his foot off the brake and leans forward, his foot poised over but not touching the gas pedal, only to conclude that the gap between the cars isn't as big as he thought, settling back into his seat with a frustrated sigh.

Something about this gesture causes me to wonder if a rumor I've been hearing about Teddy's wife, June-that she's involved with a junior faculty member in our department-just might be true. I haven't given it much credence until now because Teddy and June have such a perfect symbiotic relationship. In the English department they are known as Fred and Ginger for the grace with which they move together, without a hint of passion, toward a single, shared destination. In an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion and retribution, two people working together represent a power base, and no one has understood this sad academic truth better than Teddy and June. It's hard to imagine either of them risking it. On the other hand, it must be hard to be married to a man like Teddy, who's always leaning forward in anticipation, foot poised above the gas pedal, but too cautious to stomp.

We are on Church Street, which parallels the railyard that divides the city of Railton into two dingy, equally unattractive halves. This is the broadest section of the yard, some twenty sets of tracks wide, and most of those tracks are occupied by a rusty boxcar or two. A century ago the entire yard would have been full, the city of Railton itself thriving, its citizens looking forward to a secure future. No longer. On Church Street, where we remain idling in the left-turn lane, there is no longer a single church, though there were once, I'm told, half a dozen. The last of them, a decrepit red brick affair, long condemned and boarded up, was razed last year after some kids broke in and fell through the floor. The large parcel of land it perched on now sits empty. It's the fact that there are so many empty, littered spaces in Railton, like the windblown expanses between the boxcars in the railyard, that challenges hope. Within sight of where we sit waiting to turn onto Pleasant Street, a man named William Cherry, a lifelong Conrail employee, has recently taken his life by lying down on the track in the middle of the night. At first the speculation was that he was one of the men laid off the previous week, but the opposite turned out to be true. He had in fact lust retired with his pension and full benefits. On television his less fortunate neighbors couldn't understand it. He had it made, they said.

When it's safe, when all the oncoming traffic has passed, Teddy turns onto Pleasant, the most unpleasant of Railton streets. Lined on both sides with shabby one- and two-story office fronts, Pleasant Street is too steep to climb in winter when there's snow. Now, in early April, I suspect it may be too steep for Teddy's Civic, which is whirring heroically in its lower gears and going all of fifteen miles an hour. There's a plateau and a traffic light halfway up, and when we stop, I say, "Should I get out and push?"

"It's just cold," Teddy tells me. "Really. We're fine."

No doubt he's right. We will make it. Why this fact should be so discouraging is what I'd like to know. I can't help wondering if William Cherry also feared things would work out if he didn't do something drastic to prevent them.

"I think I can, I think I can, I think I can," I chant, as the light changes and Teddy urges forward the Little Civic That Could. A few months ago I foolishly tried to climb this same hill in a light snow. It was nearly midnight, and I was heading home from the campus and hadn't wanted to go the long way, which added ten minutes. During the long Pennsylvania winters, curbside parking is not allowed at night, so the street had a deserted, ominous feel. Mine was the only car on the five-block incline, and I made it without incident to this very plateau where Teddy and I have now stopped. The office of my insurance agent was on the corner, and I remember wishing he was there to see me do something so reckless in a car he was insuring. When the light changed, my tires spun, then caught, and I labored up the last two blocks. I couldn't have been more than ten yards from the crest of the hill when I felt the tires begin to spin and the rear end to drift. When the car stalled and I realized the brake exerted no meaningful influence, I sat back and became a witness to my own folly. With the engine dead and the snow muffling all other sounds, I found myself in a silent ballet as I slalomed gracefully down the hill, backward as far as the landing where it appeared that I would stop, right in front of my insurance agent's, but then I slipped over the edge and spun down the last three blocks, rebounding off curbs like the cue ball in a game of bumper pool, finally coming to rest at the entrance to the railyard, having suffered a loss of equilibrium but otherwise unscathed. A friend, Bodie Pie, who lives in a second-floor flat near the bottom of the hill and claims to have witnessed my balletic descent, swears she heard me laughing maniacally, but I don't remember that. The only emotion I recall is similar to the one I feel now, with Teddy on this same hill. That is, a certain sense of disappointment about such drama resulting in so little consequence. Teddy is sure we'll make it, and so am I. We have tenure, the two of us.

Once out of town, the rejuvenated Civic rushes along the two-lane blacktop like a cartoon car with a big, loopy smile (I knew I could, I knew I could), the Pennsylvania countryside hurtling by. Most of the trees along the side of the road are budding. Farther back in the deep woods there may still be patches of dirty snow, but spring is definitely in the air, and Teddy has cracked his window to take advantage of it. His thinning hair stirs in the breeze, and I half-expect to see evidence of new leafy growth on his scalp. I know he's been contemplating Rogaine. "You're only taking me home so you can flirt with Lily," I tell him.

This makes Teddy flush. He's had an innocent crush on my wife for over twenty years. If there's such a thing as an innocent crush. If there's such a thing as innocence. Since we built the house in the country, Teddy's had fewer opportunities to see Lily, so he's always on the lookout for an excuse. On those rare Saturday mornings when we still play basketball, he stops by to give me a lift. The court we play on is a few blocks from his house, but he insists the four-mile drive into the country isn't that far out of his way. One drunken night, over a decade ago, he made the mistake of confessing to me his infatuation with Lily. The secret was no sooner out than he tried to extort from me a promise not to reveal it. "If you tell her, so help me . . . ," he kept repeating.

"Don't be an idiot," I assured him. "Of course I'm going to tell her. I'm telling her as soon as I get home."

"What about our friendship?"

"Whose?"

"Ours," he explained. "Yours and mine."

"What about it?" I said. "I'm not the one in love with your wife. Don't talk to me about friendship. I should take you outside."

He grinned at me drunkenly. "You're a pacifist, remember?"

"That doesn't mean I can't threaten you," I told him. "It just means you're not required to take me seriously."

But he was taking me seriously, taking everything seriously. I could tell. "You don't love her as much as you should," he said, real tears in his eyes.

"How would you know?" William Henry Devereaux, Jr., said, dry-eyed.

"You don't," he insisted.

"Would it make you feel better if I promised to ravish her as soon as I get home?"

I mean, the situation was pretty absurd. Two middle-aged men-we were middle-aged even then-sitting in a bar in Railton, Pennsylvania, arguing about how much love was enough, how much more was deserved. The absurdity of it was lost on Teddy, however, and for a second I actually thought he was going to punch me. He had to know I was kidding him, but Teddy belongs to that vast majority who believe that love isn't something you kid about. I don't see how you could not kid about love and still claim to have a sense of humor.

Since that night, I'm the only one who makes reference to Teddy's confession. He's never retracted it, but the incident remains embarrassing. "I wish you had some feelings for June," he says now, smiling ruefully. "We could agree to a reciprocal yearning from afar."

"How old are you?" I ask him.

He's quiet for a moment. "Anyhow," he says finally. "The real reason I wanted to drive you home-"

"Oh, Christ," I say. "Here we go."

I know what's coming. For the last few months rumors have been running rampant about an impending purge at the university, one that would reach into the tenured ranks. If such a thing were to happen, virtually everyone in the English department would be vulnerable to dismissal. The news is reportedly being broken to department chairs individually in their year-end conferences with the campus executive officer. According to which rumors you listen to, the chairs are being either asked or required to draw up lists of faculty in their departments who might be considered expendable. Seniority is reportedly not a criterion.

"All right," I tell Teddy. "Give it to me. Who have you been talking to now?"

"Arnie Drenker over in Psychology."

"And you believe Arnie Drenker?" I ask. "He's certifiable."

"He swears he was ordered to make a list."

When I don't immediately respond to this, he takes his eyes off the road for a microsecond to look over at me. My right nostril, which has now swollen to the point where I can see it clearly in my peripheral vision, throbs under his scrutiny. "Why do you refuse to take the situation seriously?"

"Because it's April, Teddy," I explain. This is an old discussion. April is the month of heightened paranoia for academics, not that their normal paranoia is insufficient to ruin a perfectly fine day in any season. But April is always the worst. Whatever dirt will be done to us is always planned in April, then executed over the summer, when we are dispersed. September is always too late to remedy the reduced merit raises, the slashed travel fund, the doubled price of the parking sticker that allows us to park in the Modern Languages lot. Rumors about severe budget cuts that will affect faculty have been rampant every April for the past five years, although this year's have been particularly persistent and virulent. Still, the fact is that every year the legislature has threatened deep cuts in higher education. And every year a high-powered education task force is sent to the capitol to lobby the legislature for increased spending. Every year accusations are leveled, editorials written. Every year the threatened budget cuts are implemented, then at the last fiscal moment money is found and the budget-most of it-restored. And every year I conclude what William of Occam (that first, great modern William, a William for his time and ours, all the William we will ever need, who gave to us his magnificent razor by which to gauge simple truth, who was exiled and relinquished his life that our academic sins might be forgiven) would have concluded-that there will be no faculty purge this year, just as there was none last year, just as there will be none next year. What there will probably be next year is more belt tightening, more denied sabbaticals, an extension of the hiring freeze, a reduced photocopy budget. What there will certainly be next year is another April, and another round of rumors.

Teddy steals another quick glance at me. "Do you have any idea what your colleagues are saying?"

"No," I say, then, "yes. I mean, I know my colleagues, so I can imagine what they're saying."

"They're saying your dismissing the rumors is pretty suspicious. They're wondering if you've made up a list."

ANNOTATION

The author of The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool delivers a brilliant new novel about a professor whose sense of humor is tested by the cosmic joke. Hank Devereaux, Jr., failed novelist, creative writing teacher, and estranged son of one of academe's stars, is a hero whose cynicism must be mitigated by his love for family, friends and, ultimately, knowledge itself.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., spiritually suited to playing left field but forced by a bad hamstring to try first base, is the unlikely chairman of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a goose, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than he does, suspects his wife of having an affair with his dean, and finally confronts his philandering elderly father, the one-time king of American Literary Theory, at an abandoned amusement park.

FROM THE CRITICS

Joan Smith

Reading Richard Russo's newest novel, Straight Man, you can't help but experience a strong sense of déja vù'. The protagonist is a hapless middle-aged man who's ironic, irreverent, perhaps even brilliant, but lost without the keener emotional insight and wisdom of his beautiful wife. He mediates his relationships not just with his friends and children, but with his very self, as he negotiates the dangers of a week alone, confronting his own mortality.

And what, precisely, are those dangers? A half-dozen women of all ages he is half in love with, who may or may not be willing to sleep with him the moment he is ready to betray his marriage vows. A divorced friend who tends to keep him up drinking and with whom he spends a night in jail for drunk driving. His own perhaps self-destructive inability to avoid provoking other people, especially at the college where he is interim chair of a hilariously combative English department. His blindness to his own feelings and motivations, which leaves him believing that his behavior -- the trajectory of his life, really -- is not exactly his to control. His refusal to take care of himself physically: He ignores everything from a cold to a new inability to pee until they assume the proportions of high crisis.

We have seen something like the story of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. in the novels of Richard Ford, Tom McGuane, Louis B. Jones and Larry McMurtry, to name but a few. Yet Russo's Straight Man -- a departure from his acclaimed upstate New York novels, Nobody's Fool and The Risk Pool -- is so funny, so beautifully written, so fully imagined, it is easy to forgive its familiarity. His narrator's description of life at a mediocre Pennsylvania college is wicked and precise, and easily a metaphor for the mean-spirited insanity of most institutions. There is a wonderful scene in which Devereaux is televised in fake nose and glasses holding a goose from the campus duck pond and threatening to kill a duck a day until the state approves him his budget for the following year, and another of Devereaux inadvertently peeing on himself in his office and climbing into the ceiling (where workers have been removing asbestos) to avoid detection and (while he's at it) to eavesdrop on the departmental meeting at which he is to be impeached.

In their national search for a new chair (stymied by endless bureaucratic inanities), the members of the English department naturally rule out anyone illustrious, because that would invite comparisons to their own work. They bicker over the remaining choices to hilarious effect. No one wants a candidate, in fact, who teaches anything resembling their specialty or who has published anything in their particular genre. And there is, of course, the question of whether they should consider another white male. Devereaux has secretly renamed one young man on the faculty Orshee because he interjects that phrase when anyone uses the masculine pronoun.

Russo is an easy, elegant writer. The book is beautifully plotted, and Russo makes you care about Devereaux and his fate. He also makes you laugh out loud. "Truth be told," Devereaux muses in the prologue, "I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted." Somehow Russo has managed both. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

Picture this: William Henry (Hank) Devereaux Jr., tenured professor at a second-rank college in Pennsylvania, where he is chairman of the fractious English Department, faces TV cameras wearing a false nose and glasses, brandishing a goose over his head and threatening to kill a duck a day until he gets a budget. It's a vintage Russo scene, and there are others like it in this hilarious, wise and compassionate novel. Pushing 50, Hank is suffering a midlife crisis he will not acknowledge. After his miserable childhood as the son of a chilly mother and a downright icy father--a renowned professor, literary critic and adulterer--Hank has avoided confrontation with his emotions. He jokes about his mediocre job, his lack of self-esteem (his one novel, 20 years ago, got good reviews but didn't sell) and his role as goad and gadfly to his friends and enemies. During the course of the novel, which begins with the burial of one dog and ends with the interment of another, Hank manages to get himself in continuous trouble, in jail, in a ladies room (where he attempts to divest himself of the pants, shoe and sock he has peed in), in the hospital and out of a job. Meanwhile, Russo concocts an inspired send-up of academia's infighting and petty intrigues that ranks with the best of David Lodge, as we follow Hank's progress from perverse mockery to insight and acceptance. Readers who do not laugh uncontrollably during this raucous, witty and touching work are seriously impaired.

AudioFile

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Russo (Empire Falls) is known for delving into the hearts and minds of working-class heroes. This title, uncharacteristically, ventures into the world of academia, but maintains Russo's interest in the working man's struggle. His protagonist is an English instructor at a second-rate college. Sadly, the recording is dreadfully miscast. Freed's reading of the narrator's workday frustrations fails to communicate the humor of even the funniest moments. While Russo's work is known for its comedy, in Freed's hands his conflicted character comes off as self-important and self-absorbed. Russo's story captures well the old saw: "Why are academic politics so cut-throat? Because the stakes are so small." But small stakes don't often make for a good story. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

AudioFile - Steven I. Ramm

Paul Newman played the title role in Russo￯﾿ﾽs last novel, Nobody￯﾿ﾽs Fool, and reader Linden gives the same low-key style to Hank Devereaux, the lead character in the author￯﾿ﾽs latest gem. Sounding like your best friend, Linden relates the occurrences during a week when Devereaux an English department chair at West Central Pennsylvania University is physically assaulted by a feminist co-worker and threatens to kill a duck a day to stave off departmental budget cuts. There￯﾿ﾽs humor, love and just the right amount of quirkiness to Hank, thanks to Linden￯﾿ﾽs reading style. His voice has the feeling of a comfortable old sweater, and the pacing is perfect for listening on a lazy afternoon. S.I.R. ￯﾿ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Tom De Haven