The narrator of Richard Russo's hilarious fourth novel is a man
whom nearly everyone finds exasperating. It is not hard to see
why. William Henry Devereaux Jr. can never swallow a quip or a
saucy comeback, nor does he try to. Stick a wisenheimer like him in
a dour, paranoid college English department (has there ever been
another kind?) and comedy can practically be guaranteed. But
Russo, the author of the novels ''Mohawk,'' ''The Risk Pool'' and
''Nobody's Fool,'' is interested in more than generating laughter, and ''Straight Man'' strikes me
as the funniest serious novel I have read since -- well, maybe since ''Portnoy's Complaint.''

Comfortably, if complacently, married, and the father of two grown daughters, Hank
Devereaux is a midcareer academic a month shy of his 50th birthday. Like most of his tenured
colleagues, he is amazed still to be ensconced at West Central Pennsylvania University, a
third-rate state school. ''We have believed, all of us, like Scuffy the Tugboat,'' he says, ''that
we were made for better things.'' But while committee work, departmental politics, annual
budget cuts, puny raises and ''the increasingly militant ignorance'' of students have soured and
embittered his fellow academics, Hank refuses to sing the professorial blues, to participate in
feuds, to bed any students or to curry favor with Dickie Pope, the oily and malignant campus
executive officer.

It does seem possible, though, even likely, that being stuck for so long (two decades and
counting) in the stale and dreary town of Railton has made him reckless and a little bit crazy.
After all, here is a man -- the interim department chairman, no less -- who will gleefully tease
the touchy and extravagantly perfumed faculty poet, then find it entertaining when she hauls
off and slams him in the face with a fat notebook, bloodying his nose and hooking his left
nostril with the barbed end of the spiral ring. ''People who know me,'' he says, ''refuse to take
me seriously.''

Which is just how he wants it.

Which is not to suggest that Hank Devereaux does not have his devils. His chief devil happens
to be his own father, a philandering ''academic opportunist'' whose books of trendy literary
criticism guaranteed him a career of cushy appointments at the best universities. All intellect
and no heart, the famous scholar abandoned his wife and young son for the pursuit of
academic laurels and the smiles of pretty female graduate students. ''I have inherited from my
father most of what I had hoped to avoid,'' Hank muses in one of his many endearing
moments of self-deprecation. ''When all is said and done, I'm an English professor, like my
father. The most striking difference between him and me is that he's been a successful one.''
At the age of 29, Hank published a novel called ''Off the Road.'' It was respectfully received,
but quickly remaindered. He has never started a second one. These days, when he writes at
all, he writes satirical columns about university life for the local newspaper.

As in Russo's earlier novels, there is a lot of ambling and driving around, and frequent stops
along the way. Plot is a minor consideration. Things happen, of course: in a concentrated
period of time, less than a week, Hank's ailing father shows up in Railton, and his younger
daughter's rocky marriage abruptly ends; Hank is arrested, hospitalized, charged with
dereliction of duty and romantically pursued by a colleague's daughter. The novel's greatest
pleasures derive not from any blazing impatience to see what happens next, but from pitchperfect
dialogue, persuasive characterization and a rich progression of scenes, most of them
crackling with an impudent, screwball energy reminiscent of Howard Hawks's movies. (In its
most inspired set piece, Hank -- wearing a fake nose and glasses -- appears on local television
facetiously threatening to kill a duck a day until he gets a department budget. ''This is a
nonnegotiable demand,'' he snarls. ''I want the money on my desk in unmarked bills by
Monday morning.'')

Hank's perambulations and cumulative misadventures in his town-and-gown world, like that
famous Irishman's around Dublin, are fateful ones. Always infusing the comedy are sadness
and smothered panic. ''I appear to be a man in trouble,'' Hank finally admits to himself while
hunkered in a filthy ceiling crawl space, about to eavesdrop on his convened department
mates. It occurs to him that perhaps all of his anarchic Robin Williams-type role playing
might actually be a deep-rooted ploy to self-destruct.

Russo is a traditionalist when it comes to conclusions. His meandering stories inevitably bring
their major players to a new place, or at least to a new vantage on things. Before ''Straight
Man'' ends, in an epilogue that jumps us from April to August, Hank Devereaux has run an
emotional gantlet, and he has been changed by the experience, though not, of course, changed
utterly. He has made a tolerable peace with himself and his predicaments. For Richard Russo's
small-town Americans, contentment is always understood as a temporary state, just as
exuberant high spirits are recognized as a thin, but useful, disguise for sorrow.