Straight Man is one of the
best contemporary campus novels. Its
hero, William Henry Devereaux, Jr is chair of the English Department at a small
university in a small town not far from Philadelphia. His department is threatened with severe cutbacks and the air is
thick with rumors that he has been asked to come up with a list of faculty who
should be fired. This puts Devereaux in
a difficult position: he knows several faculty who are terrible teachers and
who have long ceased to do any writing, but some of them are his friends, and
others are his enemies. Everyone wants
to give him their opinion or to get his reassurance, and he spends much of the
novel avoiding people or refusing to answer their questions. The story takes place over the period of a
few days late in the Spring semester.

Devereaux is a very appealing
character, and he might serve as a role model for academics who have been in
similar situations. He wise cracks his
way through every situation, and is wonderfully rude. My favorite line comes in the middle of the book, as one of his
colleagues, Finny, has been working hard to convince the Department to depose
Devereaux as chair, a friend tells him. 

“Finny’s been on the phone all
afternoon. He’s got everybody all
worked up.”

“They believe Finny?” I say. It’s a silly question, of course. My colleagues are academics. They indulge paranoid fantasies for the same
reason dogs lick their own testicles.

Never a truer word was written. Devereaux is admirable in his crusty refusal
to indulge in the games played by the faculty and administration, and his goal
of turning everything into a joke. One
might interpret his threat on TV to kill a duck a day until he is given a
budget a form of a form of politics, but that would be to misunderstand his
intent; his action is more an expression of frustration and anger. Devereaux’s humor might strike some as
adolescent, but sometimes it is the best response to small-minded stupidity and
maneuvering. Devereaux strikes many on
his campus as arrogant, and he can certainly be difficult to deal with – he
likes the idea of being a loose cannon, and he does engage in some bizarre
actions – yet he has a firm grip on what is important. He does not stand on principle so much as
undermine those who are acting in bad faith. 

At the same time as Devereaux is refusing as far as
he can to engage in campus politics, he is painfully aware of his own physical
weaknesses and problems. He starts the novel
with a gash in his nose after being injured in a meeting with one of his
colleagues, after being rude about her poetry. 
Throughout the story he is troubled by his need and inability to
urinate, and he is convinced he has a stone in his bladder. His daughter’s marriage seems to be coming
apart, and he is plagued by thoughts that his wife might be having an
affair. His father, a famous literary
critic who left the family when Devereaux was a boy, is coming back to live
with his mother, who warns him that the old man is very changed and he needs to
be prepared to for this. Then there are
his students in his creative writing course, who are hostile to each other and
are unresponsive to most of his prodding of them. Devereaux’s main solace is his dog Occam, named after the
medieval philosopher William of Occam, famous for his principle that we should
not postulate entities needlessly in our explanations. Devereaux is clearly starting to think that
his life might be simpler if he gave up his position as an academic.

Straight Man is biting about life in a small
college and anyone with experience in such a realm will recognize the
characters and the in-fighting. It’s
also a richly comic work, full of a sense of the absurdity of the battles and
the need to rise above the stupidity. 
Highly recommended.

© 2002 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring,
Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island.
He is editor of Metapsychology Online Review. His main research is on
philosophical issues in psychiatry. He is especially interested in exploring
how philosophers can play a greater role in public life, and he is keen to help
foster communication between philosophers, mental health professionals, and the
general public.

Categories: Fiction