Curse You First Person Narative!

Richard Russo's Straight Man is an excellent example of what has happened to the modern novel (not as in modern and post-modern, just recent). The story is about perfectly normal people, having perfectly normal problems. In this case, it's a middle aged English professor dealing with office politics during a period of budget cuts, an enlarged prostate (which happens to be a metaphor for both his stress level and his issues with his estranged, albiet academically famous, father) and his daughter's marital problems. There, in only a few lines, I've summed up what took Russo 400 pages to say. It wasn't even until more than half way through the book that all of the characters were fully introduced.
Ironically, from the blurb on the dust jacket, I thought that I'd really enjoy the book. Even from a more detailed synopsis than the one I gave above, one would come to the same conclusion. The main character's sense of humour is dead pan, sarcastic and relies greatly on irony (a subject very close to my heart). The issues dealt with in the the novel are one's that I'm familiar with. University politics are practically the bread and butter of University conversation. The protagonist even threatens to kill a duck every day until he received his budget and later admonishes an obsequious, ambishous and untallented student for writing fiction directly based on his own life, the very thing Russo has done. The thing was that all of these things are not extrordonary. This kind of stuff goes on all the time, and nobody else thought to write a horrifically long book about it.
Furthermore, the first person narative bothers me. The reason is that it effects my own internal monologue. By silently reading the author's syntax and diction, it gradually becomes engrained into my own patterns of thought. I find myself using his repeated phrases even. I noticed this when I read the works of Chuck Palianuck, but those stories were at least odd enough to be interesting. Straight Man is just boring and has driven me further into insanity.