The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's experience of reading Richard Russo'sStraight Man. We hope they will provide interesting new angles from which to examine this funny, poignant, and compassionate novel by one of the most compelling storytellers of our day.

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., known to his friends as Hank, is a fast-talking, self-deprecating man, the classic wise guy. Now approaching fifty, Hank finds himself heading full-speed into a midlife crisis: he despises his job as English professor at an undistinguished middle-American university, and his status as a "novelist" who has not written any fiction for twenty years. He fears he may have prostate cancer, he suspects his wife of having an affair, and he avoids even thinking about the fact that his father, the elder statesman of American literary criticism with whom he has much unresolved business, will soon be reentering his orbit. Over the course of a single convoluted week, the hapless Hank goes through a painful series of adventures, some hilarious and some harrowing, which eventually take him to the brink of sanity. As he did in Nobody's Fool, Russo proves himself a master of depicting the fraught, unvoiced currents that run between parents and children, husbands and wives. In his intelligence, humor, and ability to merge sorrow and farce into a seamless fabric, Richard Russo stands out as a writer of surpassing insight and humanity.