Hank holds his colleagues in disdain ('You know the kind of company I keep. Ducks, geese, a TV news crew, the local jail, a hot tub, peaches and their pits, a dog called Occam and a missing ceiling tile complete the picture. Russo subjects his protagonist to bouts of overactive imagination, the suspicions and petty politics of colleagues, his students' decided lack of promise, his daughter's marital problems, a tempting flirtation with a younger woman, and an irritating (and possibly worrying) deterioration in the function of a certain organ. Or does it? Perhaps his absent father has had more influence that he admits. It all starts in a meeting where he is nasally mangled by a colleague. A certain week in April sees him enduring quite a variety of trials, both mental and physical. William Henry Devereaux Jnr, (Hank) at almost fifty, is interim chairman of the English department at the (chronically underfunded) West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton.

Straight Man is the fourth novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, Richard Russo.

'What ails people is never simple, and William of Occam, who provided mankind with a beacon of rationality by which to view the world of physical circumstance, knew better than to apply his razor to the irrational, where entities multiply like strands of a virus under a microscope'

Richard russo novel straight man