| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780375701900 | | Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries | | Publish Date: 6/1/1998 | | Buy.com Sku: 30288619 | | Item#: RKF55T | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.5H x 5.25L x 1T |
|
|
|
| | | 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.
Annotation:
A comic novel about a middle-aged novelist and teacher of creative writing at a Pennsylvania college ("the shallow end of the academic pool"), whose failures and cynicism threaten to destroy him, until he finds solace and meaning in the love of his family, his friends, and his work.
| PraiseSalon
"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....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." - Joan Smith 06/17/1997New York Times Book Review
"...Russo...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'....Plot is a minor consideration....The novel's greatest pleasures derive not from any blazing impatience to see what happens next, but from pitch-perfect dialogue, persuasive characterization and a rich progression of scenes, most of them crackling with an impudent, screwball energy reminiscent of Howard Hawks's movies.... Always infusing the comedy are sadness and smothered panic." - Tom De Haven 06/06/1997 Literary Review
"The author has never been funnier....Because so many American writers wind up teaching at universities, the faculty novel has become something of a commonplace, almost as inevitable as the coming-of-age narrative or the divorce chronicle. It is a testament to Russo's skill and originality that 'Straight Man' often seems as fresh as if it were the first of its sort." - Stephen Amidon July 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A] thoroughly irreverent, masterful satire of American life, circa 1997....A suer sign of Russo's skill is how difficult it is to convey the humor of this essentially dark novel....Russo, with his leisurely pacing, deliberate dialogue and keen eye for details, 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." - Thomas Curwen 09/21/1997 Atlantic Monthly
Mr. Russo's latest novel is designed to provide intelligent entertainment and does precisely that....One would not expect to find [his protagonist, a] sly boat-rocker, on a television newscast flourishing a live goose and threatening a massacre of ducks. Mr. Russo brings that and subsequent uproars off deftly, with crackling dialogue, persuasive characters, and amusing satire." - Phoebe-Lou Adams August 1997 |
| Author Bio| Richard Russo | | Richard Russo grew up in Gloversville, New York, the small, working-class town that has provided the setting for several of his books. His parents separated when he was small, and he lived with his mother but worked construction jobs with his father during vacations from the University of Arizona, where he received his B.A. He also has a Ph.D., and taught at universities in Illinois and Connecticut, then at Colby College in Maine. He began writing fiction when he realized he would rather write his own novels than analyze other people's and, in 1996, was able to quit teaching to write full time. In addition to novels, Russo has also written movie screenplays. Russo was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his novel EMPIRE FALLS. |
| |
|
|
__USERID__
/prod/Straight_Man/q/loc/106/30288619.html
|
