A gloriously funny and involving fourth novel from the author of
such comfortable-as-old-shoes fictions as Mohawk (1986) and
Nobody's Fool (1993). Writing teacher William Henry "Hank"
Devereaux Jr. is a one-shot novelist (Off the Road) who's settled
into an embattled stint as department head at an academic sinkhole
where he finds it prudent to simply tread water and go with the
flow (anyway, "promotion in an institution like West Central
Pennsylvania University was a little like being proclaimed the
winner of a shit-eating contest"). Hank tries to keep his wits
about him by adopting the philosophical principle known as Occam's
Razor (that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon or problem is
usually the correct one), but his life keeps getting in the way. A
nearby married daughter is having husband trouble. The state
legislature promises to eviscerate his departmental budget. Hank's
"crushes" on various women, including a colleague's adult daughter,
complicate his otherwise passive devotion to his no-nonsense wife
Lily. And, in addition to possible prostate cancer, Hank is
assailed by even more undignified woes: His nose is bloodied by a
poet's notebook, and he's suspected (with good reason) of murdering
a goose - and of even worse things - by a hilarious, vividly
rendered cadre of fellow academics, townspeople, and students, each
of whom is sharply individualized. Though the quests for tenure and
priority are generously detailed, and though Hank's relationship
with his long-absent father reaches a satisfying closure, plot is
only secondary (or maybe tertiary or quaternary) in a Russo novel.
This latest seduces and charms with its voice (i.e., Hank
Devereaux's): Laconic, deadpan, disarmingly modest and
self-effacing, it's the perfect vehicle for another of Russo's
irresistible revelations of the agreeable craziness of everyday
life. Besides, how can you not like a writing prof who counsels an
overzealous student to "Always understate necrophilia"? (Kirkus
Reviews)
Hank Devereaux, a fifty-year-old, one-time novelist now serving as temporary chair of the English department, has more than a mid-life crisis to contend with when he learns that he must cull 20 per cent of his department to meet budget. Half in love with three women, unable to understand his younger daughter or come to terms with his father, he has a dangerous philosophy that life, and academic life, could be simpler, but he fails to see the larger consequences of his own actions or of the small-world politics that ebb and flow around him, as his colleagues jostle for position and marriages fall apart and regroup. The despair of his wife, and the scourge of the campus geese, he is a man at odds with himself and caught somewhere between cause and effect.
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