SOURCE: Bradfield, Scott. “Department Wars.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4921 (25 July 1997): 23.

In the following review, Bradfield judges Straight Man to be a humorous but flawed novel.

Hank Devereaux, the protagonist of Richard Russo's funny and clever novel, [Straight Man,] is a professor of creative writing, hiding out in the below-par English Department of West Central Pennsylvania University, and he doesn't think he belongs anywhere better. About to turn fifty, he hasn't written a book in the twenty years since he received tenure, and he has been elected Department Chair solely because he is the sort of “militant procedural incompetent” who doesn't threaten to get anything done. In a department of losers, nobody wants to be left behind by somebody else's accomplishments. And, in an era of increasingly stringent budget cuts, accomplishing nothing is starting to look easier and easier.

Russo's portrait of the Department Wars in today's literary academy...