SOURCE: Charles, Ron. “Pillorying Pretentious Professors.” Christian Science Monitor (6 October 1997): 14.

In the following review, Charles lauds Russo's insight and wit in Straight Man, noting that the novel's satire “never slides into artifice.”

University life has served as an irresistible subject for some of the funniest satire in modern literature.

After teaching briefly at Sarah Lawrence College, Mary McCarthy set the standard high with The Groves of Academe (1952), her acerbic satire of a liberal college for women. Just two years ago Jane Smiley, who teaches at Iowa State, lambasted a Midwestern university in Moo: A Novel, a bestseller that sprawled across dozens of strange and hilarious characters.

The narrator of the latest addition to this genre, Straight Man by Richard Russo, observes wryly that “virtually everybody in the English department has a half-written novel squirreled away in a desk drawer. Sad little vessels all. Scruffy the Tugboat, lost and...