ACADEMIC BURLESQUE

By John Skow

Fitful irritation and gossip, gusting to contempt; jealousy, plotting and backbiting, holding steady at obsessional hatred and spasms of baroque fury, with likelihood of budget cuts: this is the wind chart, as any veteran of the higher-ed dodge can attest, of collegial relations in a well-ordered university English department. Or so say the profs who write about such matters in satirical novels, most of them set on campuses not readily distinguishable from their own.

The latest and one of the funniest of these vengeful academic burlesques is Richard Russo's Straight Man (Random House; 391 pages; $25). Russo, a former professor at Colby College in Maine and author of The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool, commences his slapstick when William Henry Devereaux Jr., creative-writing teacher and chairman of the English department at an obscure Pennsylvania college, makes a slighting remark about a colleague's poetry. She whacks him across the face with a notebook, and the metal coil hooks his nose.

The swollen, discolored result means that the chairman is hard-pressed to fight departmental budget wars with dignity. He has an unsatisfactory negotiation with the campus executive officer, a lizard whose "carefully calculated sincerity is almost indistinguishable from the real thing." This fellow, of course, is bent on downsizing what once was called the liberal arts. Devereaux rebels, and with TV cameras churning (dignitaries are cutting the ribbon for a grand new engineering complex), he grabs a goose from the campus pond and threatens to kill it and another like it every day until the English department gets its funding.

We aren't meant to believe any of this, merely to admire the purity of Devereaux's distilled exasperation, brought on by years of departmental politics and "the increasingly militant ignorance" of students. He was once a well-reviewed writer, though of only one book, and that short stories. But rather than agonize over their descent into professorial mediocrity, he and his colleagues, he decides, have "chosen, wisely perhaps, to be angry with each other rather than with ourselves." Wise enough. And when one addled prof goes off his medication and resumes cross-dressing, so is the counseling he receives: no pearls before 5 p.m.

--By John Skow