Straight Man

Hank Devereaux, a fifty-year-old, one-time novelist now serving as temporary chair of the English department, has more than a midlife crisis to contend with when he learns that he must cull 20 percent of his department to meet the budget. Half in love with three women and unable to understand his younger daughter or come to terms with his father, he has a dangerous philosophy that life, and academic life, could be simpler. He fails to see the larger consequences of his own actions or of the small-world politics that ebb and flow around him as his colleagues jostle for position and marriages fall apart and regroup. Faced with his wife's despair and the scourge of the campus geese, he is a man at odds with himself, caught somewhere between cause and effect.