“Middle Ages Men” by Richard Russo – Culture

If a US author wrote a campus novel today, he would probably not be able to do without a scandal, at the center of which is a star professor who is punished for linguistic “misconduct” with shit storm and pillory and presumably dismissed. Richard Russo’s “Middle Ages Men” is a campus novel without the aforementioned scandalous ingredients – the English original finally dates from 1997, and it was comparatively peaceful at the college in the fictional small town of Railston, Pennsylvania. There is already a “Sexual Harassment Committee” and even a lecturer who insists on gender-correct use of language: Whenever the masculine pronoun is used in a meeting, he adds “or she”. Which is why he is given the nickname “Odersie”.

These were harmless times, 24 years before our days, when gendering had become the regulation at local universities too, the shibboleth – it separates good and bad, friend and foe; what was meant to be inclusive causes exclusion. The “Odersie” mentioned in the novel specializes in the analysis of TV sitcoms because he considers books to be “phallocentric”. His students are not allowed to hand in their essays in writing, but only as video cassettes. A promising figure.

Russo’s campus world also allows us to look far ahead in another point: the scientists have barricaded themselves in the shelters of their methods – today we would call them “filter bubbles” – and are no longer interested in exchange and debate. The students then no longer learn to argue: “When their professors – whether feminists, Marxists, representatives of historicism or other groups of theorists – belong to suspicious, closed intellectual circles who are less interested in talking to each other than their turf staking out and pursuing their own agenda, then why should they learn to debate? “

William Henry Devereaux Jr., known as Hank, head of the English department at “West Central Pennsylvania University” and first-person narrator of the novel, has to sigh with a sigh: The college is (at most) second-rate, the college is hopelessly divided. The lecturers are mediocre and recruit mediocre: “Hiring someone high-caliber would mean opening the door to comparisons with us who were not high-caliber.” The students are untalented, lazy or both, demanding and contentious. All these findings did not make Hank a cynic, but a happy anarchist. Nothing gives him more pleasure than throwing sand in the administrative gears, spreading chaos and provoking his colleagues with surprising replicas, in a contemporary way: hurting their feelings.

Not being able to pee is not fun, but reading about it is

Hank knows all of her pain points and likes to press on them. In the case of Gracie DuBois, for example, it is the (unsuccessful) book of poetry that she is so proud of. In anger, she hits Hank with a notepad, the upper end of the spiral digging into his nose, which then swells excessively: a point of physical pain. Hank pulls a joke about it and thus amazes a randomly present local television team: he grabs one of the waddling geese by the neck at the campus pond and threatens to kill a bird every day until he finally gets his budget.

The appearance is of course not only on local television, but also nationwide on “Good Morning America” ​​and makes Hank the hate figure of animal rights activists, but also the hero of the department threatened by cuts. Only temporarily, of course, because the colleagues actually suspect that he has long since drawn up a list of the lecturers who can be dispensed with for the dean.

Hank does indeed consider many to be dispensable, but he does not make up such a list. However, since he deliberately does not dispel his doubts, his colleagues depose him as department head – in a meeting that he secretly attends from a cavity in the ceiling. He fled there after peeing in his sleep – Hank’s urine congestion is one of the running gags of the plot.

Not being able to pee is not fun, but reading about it is. Hank talks about the hits he gets with those around him, as well as his misadventures, as if he were showing a Laurel & Hardy silent film in which someone constantly slips or gets cakes in their faces. It is his method of escaping the boredom of academic provinces, but also what deeper self-inquiry would reveal. Is it not, after all, that “the purpose of spiritual sophistication is to create distance between us and our most disturbing realizations and gnawing fears”?

A deep melancholy is hidden behind the slapstick

As in classic silent films, there is a deep melancholy behind the slapstick. And behind that, in turn, the no less deep understanding of life as a great messing around, in which, if nothing happens, you have to provide a little entertainment yourself – even if it is through targeted chaos.

Richard Russo once taught at several provincial colleges himself; his Railston is modeled on the small town of Altoona in Pennsylvania, which also once flourished as a railway junction and then sank into a depression. Russo readers know such exhausted small towns and their inhabitants, who take advantage of opportunities they no longer have, from his great novels like “Nobody’s Fool” or “Empire Falls”. The film adaptation of the former earned Russo financial independence, while the latter won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.

It was only after a long delay that his work gradually found its way to German readers thanks to careful support from Dumont Verlag. Monika Köpfer’s translation reads fluently, even if some punch lines and some “esprit de repartie” are a bit clumsy. The time lag between the original and the translation can be seen with amusement from the contortions that are carried out between the correct “student” and the politically correct “student”, sometimes it is said that way, sometimes that way. We also meet “demonstrators”, “protesters” and “demonstrators” – what Hank, if he understood German, would surely have inspired a bon mot. But such embarrassed concessions to the zeitgeist do not diminish the enjoyment of this perhaps a little too long, but consistently funny, life-wise and philanthropic novel.