Who doesn’t enjoy a good satire of higher education? Colleges are easy to send up – or at least they used to be. When I remember Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim or Jane Smiley’s Moo, I think laughter, smiles and knowing glances. Recently reading Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, though, has me in a different state of mind. It might be just that book, which I found to be decidedly unfunny. Or it might be something different. I may have changed or perhaps something broader has shifted in our thinking about college satire.
Russo is a successful author whose fiction has been well-received for decades. He writes for the television and movies, too, and has even won a Pulitzer. Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool was made into an excellent movie with Paul Newman. It’s a favorite of mine. In 1997, Russo’s higher education comedy Straight Man was published. The reviews were consistently positive. Kirkus called it “gloriously funny” and the New York Times, New Yorker, and USA Today all liked it.
The book is first-person account from an English faculty member and acting department chair who is teaching at second or third tier college in Pennsylvania. Or more precisely, our narrator and faculty member is paid to teach but spends a ton of time on other issues while wrestling with a mid-life crisis. The protagonist, hero and anti-hero, William Henry Devereaux Jr., experiences a host of crises and dramas, flirtations and escapades, over a short period of time. Included in the escapades are campus politics (petty and serious), sex and flirting, sexual harassment, budget problems, student complaints, health complaints, family issues, drinking and drinking, and a whole lot more. Devereaux is a contrarian, a curmudgeon, a friend to some and also a really nasty colleague. He is difficult to everyone. We may be supposed to believe that he has a heart of gold, but chronicling his behavior makes it a difficulty claim to believe.
Entitled mediocrity best describes the environment in and around the fictional “West Central Pennsylvania University” of Straight Man. Mocking the characters’ pretensions would easier if they all were not so sad, so frustrated, and so deeply unhappy. The relatively disinterested university employer serves mostly as a foil. One could also argue that it is a facilitator and enabler to poor behavior across the board. Imagine over the top inappropriate actions, the kind that might show up on daytime reality television (Jerry Springer?), with faculty and staff as the stars.
Bracketing the strengths and weakness of this one particular book, I am starting to believe that the easy satirical pickings of higher education are now a thing of the past. We may have pretentious institutions and players, to be sure, but they are fewer and farther between. Decades of reduced funding, attacks from the left, right, above and below, and pressures to do more with less have rendered much of academia as toothless. Higher education may be generating a great deal of attention, but it is not setting the agenda or framing the conversation. As a consequence, it offers a fewer targets, and smaller ones at that, for lampooning.
Following a similar path, it is difficult today to make fun of the struggling student, burdened by debt, who hopes to do well and is not academically strong. Perhaps we can mock the entitled and pretentious. However, there are few of those students at smaller public universities. There is simply less humor to be squeezed out of these scenarios.
One could, I imagine, go super dark to make the situation funny. There have been funny novels that take place in all manner of awful situations, from wartime to future dystopias. They are different, though, than Straight Man. The book plays it straight. It’s tragic, not comedic. The book jacket extols Russo’s “high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak.” I think that he fell off on the side of unhappiness.
David Potash
