Never robust, his chest seems to have become more concave, which emphasizes his small paunch. Teddy’s my age, forty-nine, and though his features are more boyish, he too is beginning to show signs of age. I can’t help it,” he explains, when he see me grinning at him. Teddy is an insanely cautious driver, unwilling to goose his little Civic into a left turn in front of oncoming traffic.

Right at the start of the book, we meet Teddy, one of Hank’s colleagues. Other peripheral characters, much like Leo, are given such concrete characteristics that it remains easy to keep track of all of them as the English Department, which Hank chairs, faces the threat of impending budget and faculty cuts. This novel is like a masterclass in itself. I don’t know whether he’s grateful to the other students in the workshop, who have been even more determined than their instructor not to ruin him with too much praise. Like Guy in Your MFA, he thinks that he and Hank are “after a fashion, team-teaching the course.”įrom the author interviews Leo devours, he has learned that the worst thing that can happen to a talented young writer is to be given too much praise, so Leo is grateful to me for protecting him. In Hank’s workshop, his student Leo is unshakably confident despite his mediocre writing skills. The book is the story of William Henry Devereaux, Jr.-Hank, for short-a professor in the English Department at the Railton Campus of West Central Pennsylvania University. Guy in Your MFA may be all the rage on Twitter these days but he first made an appearance in Straight Man, the 1997 novel by Richard Russo.

The straight man novel