Recommendations
Books Like Straight Man by Richard Russo
For readers of the great academic comedy
If you loved Straight Man — Hank Devereaux's catastrophic week, the goose hostage, the kidney stone, the budget crisis, Russo's sustained academic comedy — these novels share the same territory: the university as a world of low-stakes high passion, and the specific comedy of people who chose academic life and are now living in it.
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Buy on AmazonEmpire Falls
by Richard Russo
Russo's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in his major fiction; where Straight Man is academic comedy, Empire Falls is the full expression of his serious ambition in the dying mill-town mode.
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Buy on AmazonNobody's Fool
by Richard Russo
Russo's great working-class comic novel — Sully Sullivan's week in North Bath; the companion in his comedy; both Sully and Hank are men who are exactly themselves in situations that call for someone different.
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Buy on AmazonLucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Amis's British academic comedy — the essential predecessor in the genre; Jim Dixon at the provincial British university is the 1950s British version of Hank Devereaux; Lucky Jim invented the academic comedy and Straight Man is its fullest American descendant.
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Buy on AmazonWonder Boys
by Michael Chabon
Chabon's novel about an English professor who can't finish his novel — Grady Tripp's chaotic weekend is the more literary, drug-addled version of what Hank Devereaux's week represents; both are about middle-aged men in academic settings having catastrophic experiences.
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Buy on AmazonThe Secret History
by Donna Tartt
Tartt's novel about the dark side of a Vermont small college — the companion in American academic fiction; where Straight Man is comic about academic life, The Secret History is Gothic; both use the university setting to examine human nature under unusual pressure.
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Buy on AmazonChanging Places
by David Lodge
Lodge's novel about a transatlantic academic exchange — the companion in the British academic comedy tradition; Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp's exchange between a British provincial university and a California university is the British version of Russo's American academic comedy.
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Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
Williams's novel about a Missouri English professor's quiet life — the companion in the academic novel tradition; Stoner is the anti-comedy version of the same academic world Straight Man inhabits; both are about what an academic life actually contains.
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Buy on AmazonThe Human Stain
by Philip Roth
Roth's novel about a classics professor at a small New England college whose career is destroyed by a racial accusation — the companion in American academic fiction about what happens when the university's internal politics meet the outside world; the serious, tragic version of the academic novel Russo writes in comic mode.
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