SANFORD PINSKER
451
This from a man who teaches courses in persuasive technique, knowing full
well that his students (like the faculty) want, above all else, "to avoid the
ridicul e of the less important, and that the cost of avoiding this grief is a
studied silence."
And here is Devereaux's gut honest assessment of what has happened
to himself-as well as to many of his aging contemporaries-as one decade
at West Central slid uneventfully into another:
We hadn't, any of us, intended to allow the pettiness of committee
work, departmental politics, daily lesson plans, and the increasingly
militant ignorance of our students let so many years slip by. And now
in advancing midcUe age we've chosen, wisely perhaps, to be angry
wi th each other rather than wi th ourselves. We preferred not to face
the distinct possibili
ty
that if we'd have been made for better things,
we'd have done those things.
Wry musings of this sort dot Russo's landscape, but fortunately they are
forced to share floor space wi th some of the funnies t, mos t outrageous plot
developments this side of
Lucky Jim.
Devereaux begins his story with the
wounds caused when a feminist poet of dubious distinction took excep–
tion to a stray remark he made at a department meeting and bonked him
on the beezer with her spiral notebook. A loose wire puts an ugly gash on
his nose, and thus we get a picture of life among short academic fuses. But
even this ante goes up considerably when Devereaux threatens to kill one
campus-pond duck for every day that the administration fails to provide
him with the English department's annual budget. Talk about "all hell
breaking loose"! The reverberations (duly covered by the local TV station)
more than make up for the long uneventful stretch he had put in at West
Central.
Such manufactured, fictional excitement is perhaps the nub of why
novels about campus life continue to have such an intrinsic appeal, for what
we get is not academic life as it actually is, but rather a heightened, highly
patterned alternative. Professors devour such novels because they contain
just enough to seem familiar, even as their pages move steadily into terri–
tories over the top. One way of describing the effect might be to call it
comic relief; another possibility is the sense of superiority fostered in read–
ers as the distance between a loony them and an altogether worthy
us
steadily increases.
But in the best of the breed, what readers (academics and non-academics
alike) react to are the special pleasures that only a piece of well-wrought
