Straight Man
This is the story of Hank Devereaux, temporary Chair of the English Faculty from Hell at West Central Pennsylvania University. Devereaux is a man with a sense of humour where his sense of responsibility should be, and if he’s been forced to lead the squabbling, neurotic bunch of no-hopers he calls his colleagues, he’ll do so as the Lord of Misrule, whipping up vituperation and dissent to epic proportions. He just can’t help himself when there’s perverse pleasure to be had, which is odd because helping himself seems to be the one thing that Hank generally can’t do. For this reason he’s a dormant novelist stuck in a second-rate teaching institution, half in love with three women and wholly out of synch with his life.
But this is nothing compared to the trouble that’s on its way. This year it seems that the rumours for once are true: he’ll have to lose a fifth of his department to meet new budgets. And deal with his daughter’s failing marriage. And pass a kidney stone. And if he can manage all that, his aberrant, adulterous father is all set to return, a broken man, to the care of his ex-wife.
However, even before the bedlam is unleashed, the indications that Hank will somehow survive it are clear to be seen in the untarnished love his wife bears for him. Fiction has simple rules, really: two inviolable regulations state that bad mothers are unforgiveable, and loved husbands are untouchable. The measure of a man’s real character can be gauged by the quality of his wife’s fidelity, and Lily knows Hank and loves him nevertheless. Still, at this crucial point in time Lily removes her magic ring of wifely protection by going away for an interview, and the subsequent events occur as if within a fold of time occasioned by her absence.
‘I have this fear,’ says Lily, the Oracle. ‘I can’t decide where you’re going to be when I get home. In the hospital or in jail.’ Well, Hank is never one to miss an opportunity for welcoming in chaos. And it’s not just the unwitting fulfilment of the prophesy that gives this novel shades of Oedipus. Scratch the surface drama of Hank’s life and we find the resentment and longing that characterise his stillborn relationship to his father. Can Hank kill the domineering image of his father in his head and become his own man? It doesn’t help that they’ve got the same name. Hank’s no Oedipus in the Sophocles tradition – in the modern world (or at least on campus) men can’t really manage to avenge themselves by murdering others, but they can manage to do a fair amount of damage to themselves. The touching triumph of the book is to restore Hank to himself, to return the reins of his life to his hands and place him back in the driver’s seat.
I found myself, at the end of this richly funny book, pondering the nature of comedy and the uses to which we put it. It struck me that the tragic-comic is a kind of default setting of drama, because as flawed humans we can only stand so much tragedy before we short-circuit into irony or farce. But that makes humour always a way of deadening emotion, of undercutting it’s power and intensity. I have seen it written many times, and for this reason risk a dangerous generalisation, that men (especially) fear that they will lead only muffled lives, which is one of the reasons that Hank is so ready to court the kind of danger he can't dismiss with a quip or a joke. It’s the comic, which seems his saviour, that turns out to be Hank’s inner tyrant. Hence the novel's interest in the figure of the straight man, the one who is not yet overwhelmed by life’s risibility.
But the real beauty of this book, for me, was its ability to show us how many-layered human beings are. It shows us how our past is always there, a heartbeat away, inhabiting our actions and inhibiting others. It shows also how we can change and become new from one minute to the next, if we are willing, if we are loved, if we are brave. And for all that academics get a bit of a bashing in this novel (which it would seem they fully deserve), Hank is still in the right place, even if not perhaps with the right people, to acknowledge the multiple possibilities underpinning the stories of our lives. Where else but an English Department would he be forced to examine and embrace the power of interpretation? For being able to see things differently, no matter how simple or complex they may at first appear, turns out to be our saving grace.
Reviewed by litlove
- Array
