The English Major: A Novel
by Jim Harrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jim HarrisonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-10-01
ISBN: 0802144144
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of The English Major: A Novel
Book Review: Go west, old man
Summary: 5 Stars
The book is crude, let me tell you. Those of a delicate countenance are not going to find it readable. But for the rest of us, Harrison does crude better than anyone.
I'd add that "The English Major" is raucous, hilarious and peripatetic. But then I'm the same age as the old geezer at the center of the novel and consequently more partial to his sensibilities.
"The English Major" gathers up the ruminations of Cliff, a grizzled 60-year-old Michigan Upper Peninsula cherry farmer and former English teacher who has just been jettisoned by Vivian, his wife of nearly 40 years.
The book is picaresque; on the surface it recounts a road trip that becomes a song to the land, the magical aspects of nature, a deep respect for heritage and above all to living a life as fully as a person can manage.
After Vivian, a "whirlwind" of a real estate broker who is partial to butterscotch schnapps and addicted to Pepsi and powdered donuts, sells his house out from under him and takes up with another man, Cliff throws a couple things, including a plastic jigsaw puzzle of the United States, into the back of his trusty, rusty brown Taurus and heads out to see America. Along the way, he comes up with a grand personal mission in life to rename all the states and birds of North America to give them more meaning.
As he zigzags is a westerly direction, he chucks puzzle pieces out the car window representing each of the states he's crossed, deconstructing America as he rolls across prairie, climbs over mountains and winds down the California coast.
For Wisconsinites, there's some local color: Just over the Michigan border outside Iron Mountain he stops to take a photo of the Wisconsin welcome sign. "On the other side of the road there was a big liquor and beer supermarket so Michiganders could take advantage of lower Wisconsin prices. I bought myself a pint of hooch I'd never tasted before called George Dickel. Since I was working on a clean slate why not try a new brand of liquor?"
He muses that his doctor friend back in Michigan "had said that Wisconsin girls on the average are the biggest in the United States due to readily available dairy products plus fast food." (By the way, his new name for Wisconsin is Menominee and he decides to refer to the state bird, the robin, as an orange breasted thrush.)
In Morris, Minnesota, he stops to visit one of the three former students he ever cared to keep in touch with over the two-plus decades since he stopped teaching. Marybelle was at the top of that three-person list. Cliff thinks of Marybelle as an "off-brand peach, real pretty to some tastes, but a little exotic to the local boys."
Although married, Marybelle eagerly walks away from the dullness in her life and goes along for the wild ride. She joins Cliff in what quickly turns out to be a raw sexual romp of staggering intensity and endurance. A real "jolt to his noodle," as Cliff describes it.
A couple of states down the road Cliff is exhausted by the antics. "Forty-five years of sex fantasies come true and I'm thinking that I wish I could go fishing." At this point in the story, Cliff spends a good deal of time talking about the abraded state of his penis and the number of the different salves and ointments he uses to ease the condition. See what I mean about crude.
As he meanders, the musings of this wizened old geezer, who describes himself as someone who has been relegated to the "biological dumpster," are really quite something for the reader to behold: women, food, trout fishing, drink, women, canine companionship, trout fishing, sex and women, and always dealing with the uncertainty of what comes next in this life.
A bit about the food. In a 2007 New York Times interview, Harrison was described as a two-dimensional eater who relishes quantity and quality as equal gustatory ingredients.
Throughout his trip he keeps us informed of his culinary scorecard. At a café called the Bistro in Livingston, Montana, he's served a skirt steak accompanied by the best French fries of his life. At a tavern near Casper, Wyoming, he has one of the top five burgers of his life in the category unfrozen half-pound patty.
Food is right up there with sex on Cliff's list of things to relish in life. He often likes to equate the two, "My porterhouse had a labial rose rareness and I thought about how things get confused with desire."
Food can also have political overtones. At Babe's Diner in the U.P. of Michigan, owner Clark has taken Canadian bacon off the menu because he thinks the Canadians haven't done enough to help out in Iraq. He also tried serving "freedom fries," but gave it up when everybody just kept ordering the same old French fries.
Other of Harrison's books have been somber, elegiac. "True North" comes to mind. "Returning to Earth" is often downright tearful. This book on the other hand is one hell of a comic romp, and as one of his characters says in "Returning to Earth" a veritable "sexual extravaganza."
His style contains some of the sneakiest language you're likely to encounter. He all but leaves out commas and a lot of other punctuation, which gives the narrative a sense of thoughts spilling out all over the place, sometimes in no logical sequence. But the order of those words and the images they evoke creep up on you and make for a provocative read.
"A Jersey cow is following us. I look back at the bungalow which is catching the light of the orange rising sun. Grandpa is drinking coffee with a splash of Four Roses whiskey for his heart. Teddy is sitting in a puddle in the driveway. Dad is digging earthworms in the corner of the yard so we can catch bluegills to fry up for lunch. And here I am fifty years later, an old body bent on a new life."
Time and time again, plain old words and arcane references (Cliff refers to microwaves as a "radar ranges") pile up against one another to create unexpected and comic images that have a way of lingering.
Here's how he describes his son Robert who lives in San Francisco and pulls in towering piles of money working in the film industry: "Since Robert was young, he had had this irritating habit of emphasizing every fifth word or so whether word deserved it or not. `Dad, let's face it, YOU never were in sync WITH mom. When she was worried ABOUT her big butt, you'd ONLY say that there's northing WRONG about a big butt. YOU were supposed to say, VIVIAN, your butt is not so BIG."
Harrison has had a long career writing often about backwoods life at the end of a two-track in Northern Michigan. His novels, reporting and memories are infused with Native American lore and legend. He can be spell binding in sharing his love of the land. He's created a number of characters that will not be forgotten, male and female. The beloved Dalva, Brown Dog, Claire, the forlorn heroine of "The Woman Lit by Fireflies," are a few. Cliff joins the circle.
In a 2007 New York Times interview Harrison seemed to be having so much fun writing "The English Major" that he said he lengthened the enjoyment by rationing himself to a page a day. That exuberance infuses every page of the book. Writing it was fun, Harrison says. Reading it is too.
Summary of The English Major: A Novel
“It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn?t.? With these words, Jim Harrison begins a riotous, moving novel that sends a sixty-something man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America. Cliff is armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds, the latter of which have been unjustly saddled with white men?s banal monikers up until now. His adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high-school-teacher days twenty-some years before, to a “snake farm? in Arizona owned by an old classmate, and to the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer who has just bought an apartment over the Presidio in San Francisco. Now in paperback, Jim Harrison?s riotous and moving cross-country novel,The English Major, is the map of a man?s journey into, and out of, himself. It is vintage Harrison—reflective, big-picture American, and replete with wicked wit.
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