SOURCE: Saari, Jon. Review of Straight Man, by Richard Russo. Antioch Review 56, no. 2 (spring 1998): 240.

In the following review, Saari praises the rich comic narrative of Straight Man.

The running joke here is that the university is a three-ring circus of clowns and buffoons who provide an unending supply of hilarity. In the hands of Russo's William Henry Devereaux, Jr., or Lucky Hank to friends and enemies alike, the narrator [of Straight Man], life at the backwater West Central Pennsylvania University creates an unnerving anticipation of disaster. In a time of frenzy and wrath, Henry Devereaux, the interim head of the English department, finds attention directed toward him and his supposed hit list, the result of a 20 percent faculty cutback mandated by the campus CEO, Dickie Pope. Devereaux's colleagues are often vociferous in registering their contempt for him, but Devereaux is hardly timid in fending off the slings and...