I just finished his 1998 work Straight Man, a very funny yet sometimes sad account of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. ("Hank"), the interim chair of the English department at the fictional West Central Pennsylvania University. Much of the novel lampoons university life, particularly the absurd personalities who call themselves professors. This year, as every year, the state legislature is threatening budget cuts, to which everyone routinely freaks out. The English profs all hate each other anyway, and it falls to Hank to either assure people that they're not getting fired or to choose who has to be fired. Only his personality is such that he could hardly care less.
Straight Man is a lot funnier than the other two Russo novels I've read, Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs. At one point Hank grabs a particularly troublesome goose (whom he has named after a particularly troublesome colleague) by the neck and threatens to kill a goose per day until he gets a budget. All while wearing a fake nose and glasses. And being filmed by the local news crew.
Yet Straight Man also shares much of the theme and tone as Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs. Each novel takes place in a dying industrial town in the mid-Atlantic/New England region. The death of the town in some way parallels the decline of the characters, who are often haunted by the past. This point is made explicitly at the end of Straight Man when one of Hank's colleagues says, "Most people are one way or another. . . . They either want to confront the past or escape it" (389). In Hank's case this past revolves around his philandering father, the famous literary critic William Henry Devereaux, Sr. The return of his father after years of absence and infidelity towards the end of the novel supplies what I think is the best and saddest scene from the whole book. I want to quote it in full:
"You may find this strange," he says, "but I've recently started rereading Dickens."
Clearly he imagines he's paying the author a compliment by returning in his final years to a writer whose mawkishness he's derided over a long career. "Much of the work is appalling, of course. Simply appalling," my father concedes, genuflecting before his previous wisdom on the subject. "Most of it, probably. But there is something there, isn't there. Some power . . . something"--he searches for the right word here--"transcendent, really."
It would be pointless for me to offer an observation, I know. This conversation he's ostensibly having with me he's really having with himself, and the truth is I can never remember having a conversation with him that wasn't this way.
"I feel almost," he says, "as though I had sinned against that man."
This statement, it must be said, brings me to the brink of powerful emotion. It must be a hybrid of some sort, since sorrow and hilarity seem equally justifiable in this circumstance. "Dad," I finally say, when I locate my voice. "This is what you feel guilty about? You feel guilty about the way you treated Dickens?"
He nods without hesitation. "Yes," he says, then again, "yes."
I think it's me he's looking at as he says this until I realize his focus is somewhere behind me, on the abandoned carousel, perhaps, or maybe he's with Pip and Joe Gargery at the forge. At which point something happens to his face. It seems almost to come apart, and then tears are streaming down his cheeks, exactly as Mr. Purty described. "I wish . . . ," he begins, but he's unable to continue. He's too overcome with grief. (346)This scene, with a father's refusal to see whom he's actually sinned against and a son's inability to forgive and move one, is deeply insightful into the human heart. I can't help but think of 1 John 1:9: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Because of the gospel we don't have to be haunted by the past. We can move on both from our sins and sins committed against us.
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