Straight Man

Though the title of Bingham’s new novel sug­gests one half of a com­edy team, the feel­ings of the pro­tag­o­nist, Louisville col­lege pro­fes­sor Colby Winn, are no joke. When Colby picks up hitchiker Ann Lee Crabtree, his ini­tial inter­est in the free-spirited woman almost imme­di­ately becomes obsessive.

To his friends, par­tic­u­larly I. and Martha Weekly, who are expect­ing their first child,Colby’s infat­u­a­tion with Ann Lee seems like a good thing. But it’s soon clear that he’s out of con­trol. In one of the book’s many dead-on obser­va­tions, the ini­tial con­sum­ma­tion of Colby’s affair with Ann Lee leaves him dev­as­tated when she refuses to “play” with him because he’s too seri­ous about her. Bingham uses the idea of play­ing, and Ann Lee’s career — she’s an intin­er­ant actress whose cur­rent role involves both vio­lence and on-stage romance — to pry open Colby’s repressed mem­o­ries, forc­ing him to review his failed mar­riage and his rela­tion­ship with his phys­i­cally abu­sive father.

In fact, Colby has a vio­lent streak of his own, which becomes more and more appar­ent as he watches Ann Lee rehearse her play and develop a rela­tion­ship with Martha Weekly. Bingham (Matron of Honor) charts Colby’s descent from lonely-but-likable to creepy-and-dangerous with sharp insights about the many forms that pos­ses­sive­ness takes, from the dashed expec­ta­tions of new lovers (and new fathers) to the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of biol­ogy as destiny.

The novel’s strength is the quiet author­ity with which Bingham writes, mak­ing her story dis­turb­ing, and dis­turbingly real.

Reviews:

“We’ve encoun­tered men like Shelby Winn on cam­pus, at par­ties, in the pages of John Updike and Phillip Roth, and in bed. He’s the needy exploiter, the cynic, the impo­tent lover of women and of words… Bingham’s Winn in unusual in that he pos­sesses an extra­or­di­nary degree of insight into his own behavior…”

“Written in clean, spare lan­guage, Straight man is not a book that wastes your time…. The pages turn with­out effort.”
— The New Mexican

“Winn learns, to his own and other’s sor­row, that he was right to dis­trust him­self, It’s a point of dimin­ish­ing returns, when he can no longer tell hope and pain apart—an inter­sec­tion of male yearn­ing and bru­tal­ity that Bingham maps with pre­ci­sion, sym­pa­thy, even humor.”
— The Los Angles Times

“A refugee from a ster­ile mar­riage, Winn frets about sex­ual per­for­mance. He’s hon­est to a fault, con­fess­ing he finds women “too graphic, too real, they take up space.” And he’s haunted by his father’s legacy of domes­tic vio­lence…”
— The New York Times

“…he imme­di­ately gets seri­ous about a hitch­hike he picks up, a frag­ile actress with inner strength—and scars—to match his own. As he obses­sively fol­lows the girl…., he dis­cov­ers that he can love, but he can also abuse as his father did dur­ing his par­ents’ com­plex mar­riage. Bingham gains our sym­pa­thy for her intel­li­gent, appeal­ing char­ac­ters, than sur­prises us with behav­ior we don’t wan to believe them capa­ble of…”
— Booklist

From an inter­view with the author…

“I very much like to cre­ate sym­pa­thy for peo­ple who are unsympathetic—it’s the way that I, as a writer, have come to under­stand, and even like, a basi­cally dif­fi­cult character.

“Fiction fails when it’s too nar­row, too close to home. There has to be a large grasp, tak­ing on large char­ac­ters.”
— The New Mexican

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