Straight Man

The novel opens with a prologue in which the narrator, William Henry Devereaux, Jr., recalls the one childhood story both his divorced parents agree upon. At nine, Hank badgers his academic parents relentlessly for a dog until his mother relents. His father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., a famous literary critic who held a series of prestigious visiting professorships, brings home an elderly, arthritic Irish setter from a colleague entering a nursing home. The dog drops dead almost immediately, apparently from the shock of a slamming screen door. Hank's father digs a grave with borrowed tools, blistering his soft hands. When Hank suggests naming the dead dog "Red," his father stares at him as though looking at a creature from another species. The anecdote crystallizes the gulf between father and son that will define Hank's adult life.

Decades later, Hank is 49 and the reluctant interim chair of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, a declining Pennsylvania railroad town. The story unfolds across a single week in April. On Wednesday, Hank's nostril is punctured by the spiral ring of a colleague's notebook during a contentious committee meeting about the department's stalled search for a new outside chair. Teddy Barnes, Hank's closest colleague, who harbors a longstanding crush on Hank's wife Lily, drives him home. Lily, a high school teacher headed to Philadelphia for a job interview, correctly guesses that Hank "called the question" even after being injured.

At home that evening, the couple nearly shares an intimate moment, but Hank deflects Lily's tenderness by pretending her touch on a scalp scar hurts. She tells him she is unhappy to see him "so lost." Hank has also been experiencing painful difficulty urinating, which he fears signals a kidney stone inherited from his father, and he resolves to keep this secret. The campus buzzes with rumors of an impending staff purge driven by state budget cuts. Billy Quigley, an exhausted colleague with an alcohol addiction who has put 10 children through Catholic schools, calls drunk and berates Hank as a "peckerwood" and a "Judas," terrified of losing his job.

On Thursday, Hank visits his elderly mother, who criticizes his recent newspaper column about his father as lacking "high seriousness" and warns that Hank is unprepared for his father's imminent return to Railton. Descending to her dark cellar for a suitcase, Hank suffers the first of several disorienting near-blackouts, brief lapses he begins to think of as "ellipses." In the cellar, he finds the bejeweled dog collar from his childhood campaign for a pet.

That afternoon, after a failed writing workshop and a racquetball match with his colleague Tony Coniglia, Hank encounters a TV crew at the campus duck pond. Seized by impulsive anger, he grabs a goose by the neck, dons fake nose-and-glasses given to him by Mr. Purty, his mother's persistent landlord-suitor, and announces on camera that he will kill a duck a day until he gets his department's budget. The clip airs on Good Morning America the next morning. Walking home at 3 a.m. after a night of celebrating, Hank encounters a barefoot young woman who says "You're not him" and wanders away, later revealed to be a former student with a mental health condition who believes Tony is God.

On Friday, Dickie Pope, a senior campus administrator, reveals a chancellor's mandate to reduce staff by 20 percent and frames the cuts as Hank's opportunity to shape the department by suggesting criteria for elimination. Hank neither agrees nor refuses. That afternoon, he finds his daughter Julie with a swollen, nearly shut left eye at the house Julie shares with her husband Russell. Julie says Russell shoved her and she fell. Hank brings her home. Union representative Herbert Schonberg and Paul Rourke, a bitter former seminarian who has long loathed Hank, pressure him to side with the union. Hank refuses to commit. When Lily calls from Philadelphia, she reveals that her father Angelo is in jail for threatening young men on his porch with a shotgun, and she must delay her return.

Hank spends the weekend sick in bed, dosing himself with cold medicine. He composes a newspaper column about his father's traumatic first semester at Columbia, when the elder Devereaux arrived to take up a prestigious named chair and found himself unable to speak in the classroom until he discovered he could function by starting lectures in the hallway and entering mid-sentence. Messages pile up, including Billy Quigley's slurred message: "You Judas Peckerwood."

On Monday, a dead goose is found hanging from a campus tree, and Hank is the prime suspect. Rachel, the department secretary whose short stories Hank has been secretly submitting to his literary agent, reveals that the agent has called wanting to represent her work. Hank learns from Dean Jacob Rose that the chair search is dead, that Jacob was quietly fired by Dickie Pope months ago, and that Jacob plans to marry Gracie DuBois, a colleague in the department. At his doctor's office, X-rays show no kidney stone, but the doctor detects an asymmetry during an exam and orders blood work, raising the possibility of a tumor.

The department meeting to recall Hank as chair convenes. Hank does not attend but instead falls asleep in his office, where he involuntarily voids his bladder. In a panic, he climbs through a hole in the ceiling left by asbestos removal workers and observes the vote from the sweltering rafters above the conference room: 18 to 9 for recall. He drops through the ceiling gap a folded copy of the department operating paper that Rachel discovered requires a three-fourths majority, not the two-thirds the organizers assumed. The recall fails.

That evening, Russell confesses to Hank that the fight began when Julie bought an expensive chair they could not afford. He issued an ultimatum, and when Julie chose the chair without hesitation, Russell moved her aside from the door and she fell into a stereo cabinet. Tony arrives with whiskey and delivers a long meditation on "the mystery of human affection," calibrating love in percentiles. Both men end the night arrested separately for DUI and deposited in the same jail cell.

On Tuesday, Hank learns the union has obtained the administration's list of faculty to be cut from English: the fourth name, Rourke implies, is Hank himself. Finding Russell asleep at the apartment of Meg Quigley, Billy's daughter, Hank suppresses his fury and drives his son-in-law to the airport with a ticket to Atlanta. Visiting his mother's flat, Hank encounters his father for the first time since an earlier hospitalization: a fragile old man dozing in front of the television. They walk to an abandoned amusement park, where the elder Devereaux drifts into a confession that he may have "sinned against" Dickens by dismissing the novelist throughout his career. The guilt is literary, not personal: His father grieves for Dickens but not for the wife he abandoned or the son he left behind.

In a climactic meeting, Hank learns that Dickie Pope has been fired and Jacob Rose has been appointed the new campus leader. Jacob reveals he created the English department list strategically, offering the named faculty jobs or buyouts, and that the fourth name is Hank, a gambit to persuade him to accept the now-vacant deanship. Hank refuses. Jacob, furious, demands to know what Hank wants. Overwhelmed by a massive wave of urinary pressure, Hank grabs Jacob by the lapels and whispers, "I want... to pee." He staggers to the men's room, experiences a powerful, relieving release, and collapses laughing on the floor.