My daughter in Kentucky recently gave me this hilarious novel. As she is a university teacher and formerly a program chair whose program has been cut by a severe reduction in state funding, I can understand why she recommended it. The theme is eerily similar, although the setting is in a fictitious small university town in Pennsylvania. The English Department, already severely dysfunctional with faculty that all seem to hate each other, is driven to extremes by rivalries, personality conflicts and unfulfilled ambitions- and by looming cuts in funding to the whole university. There are no straight men, (in the dramatic sense, not the sexual one) although the narrator, the cartoonish Wm. Henry Devereau Jr., seems, by the title, to regard himself as the only sane person in the whole university. This is in spite of the fact that he has an uncanny proclivity for making enemies and is a dedicated hypochondriac who could easily satisfy all the criteria for a number of mental disorders. In the course of one week he gets his nose smashed and pierced by an angry colleague, suspects his wife of infidelity with the Dean, threatens on public TV to kill a goose a day until he gets his budget, and exposes the eccentricities of the faculty, students and staff alike.
This is a great mockery of professorial stuffiness. A dog named Occam sniffs the crotch or humps the leg of anyone who comes near him and seems to be the only creature to understand and apply the principle of Occam’s Razor. There are drunkards, womanizers, and deadbeat tenured professors who happily bed down their graduate students in exchange for passing grades, and openly covet their colleagues’ wives. But this was written in the mid 1990s before the #Me-Too movement, and it comes across as both sad and funny. Everyone&, it seems, has ambitions to become a famous author, but no two of them can agree on what constitutes good writing.
I was not familiar with Richard Russo’s previous writing but this one is a light fun read and a great sendup to the pretensions of academic life in the arts. Some day when I need something light, I may try Nobody’s Fool or the more recent Everybody’s Fool.
The Passionate Reader 