The professor who came out of the closet, attended sexual orientation counseling at the behest of his wife, and returns to the closet - his flamboyant white suit and fake PHD the basis of what makes this offensive take on homosexuality 'funny.' The socially outcast writing student, angry with all the pretty women who consistently reject and emasculate him writes long and prurient stories featuring graphic and endless rape scenes and even necrophilia. Middle aged professors flirting with and sometimes sleeping with students. I couldn't bring myself to care about or like a single character, and the chauvanistic tropes felt tired and dated, and more often than not, creepy.

I loved Confederacy of Dunces and thought Straight Man might make me laugh too. Looking for a smart, funny, witty book I chose this based on the great reviews. I listened to the great reviews to my great regret

In short, Straight Man is classic Russo - side-splitting and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down. All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character - he is a born anarchist - and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans. Russo's protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. In this uproarious novel, Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak.

Straight Man by Richard Russo