A review by mkhaas29
Straight Man by Richard Russo

3.0

A meandering tale of one small college English department’s staff in the 80s (?) or late 70s (?) narrated by an apathetic writing professor who happens to chair the department. The majority of the book’s events happen in the course of a week when his wife is out of town, but the scenes are set with lots of characters, back story, cynicism, and witticism. I think I’ve decided I don’t always love audiobooks when the content is meant to be funny. Sometimes the joke lands and other times it doesn’t, but mostly I can’t help but think I would have delivered the punch lines differently. So that becomes distracting and can take away from the humor of it all. Though there were many a good one-liners and ridiculous situations here to appreciate.

Overall, there was just so much happening and so many characters’ mini dramas expounded on that it felt like perhaps if you took this at a much, much slower pace to read it could be best appreciated.