The English Major

"The English Major" is fiction, but is not in any way a structured novel or novella, the latter being the author's recent signature strength. The book is 250 pages of following the mind of Jim Harrison on a tour of turning 60 years old through the eyes of his narrator, a journey Harrison at around 70 can document with experience. The narrator is on a road trip looking for the next step, having lost his farm, his wife, and his dog in short order, not necessarily in order of importance, and therefore having lost his bearings as well. The story sometimes seems to beg for an edit, it wanders and repeats, themes surface,disappear, and then come back reconstituted, but that may be the way the aging narrator's mind works, a purposeful style. It doesn't really matter because the treat is Harrison as raconteur. When reading there were many lines that jumped out as perfectly funny, low key wisdom about these current days. Looking back for those lines now they're hard to find, not hard to find on a page but almost impossible to quote because the humor is in the fabric of the author's storytelling. It's Cliff the protagonist as literate farmer on the lam and his always broke doctor friend A.D. as the perpetual unrestrained celebrant who proffer the observations that make the book work. Despite my comment, let's try a few of those lines that worked so well in the context of the book. ---"Time tricks us into thinking we're a part of her and then leaves us behind." ---"I said about her favorite novels that there didn't need to be any conspiracy, they own it all anyway, she said, what do you know about the world." ---"Normal people don't try to be normal people, they're just hopelessly normal people." ---"At age 55, A.D. was finding it hard to be A.D." ---"Some men will climb the same mountain hundreds of times while other men need to climb hundreds of mountains." ---"There was the sudden troubling thought that nobody seems to know much of anything." For the most part not pithy Mark Twain quotables but within the book these and countless others really sneak up and work. The most often repeated theme is "the farmer doesn't own the farm, the farm owns the farmer", which is pretty much the narrator's concept of life as a whole. But as he is mired in his travels and his mind in the rural midwest, west, and southwest, trying to find a place where "they put coffee in coffee", he is buoyed by a memory of his Dad. "Jesus Christ, toughen up. That's what Dad would say. Toughen up. He would make up awful stories to prove a point, insisting they were true. An example: There was a little ranch boy with a crippled foot. He left his muddy boots outside and one morning when he slipped his crippled foot into the boot a baby rattlesnake that had crawled into the boot during the night lay in wait. The boy's crippled foot had to be amputated." With Harrison the story can meander slowly and then turn in any direction, with the turns being the fun part. It's a r

What a pleasure it was to read this book, which could only have been written by someone with astonishing maturity as a writer. Every "device" is discarded, casually, for the sake of genuine honesty. Of course it's beautifully written, but is is also so wise.

"The English Major" skips along at a breezy pace, yet it's also weighty and rich. The writing is magic. The narrative from main character Cliff is a joke-a-paragraph journey into one man's crazy-eyed view of the world and it's also about real love and real passions (plural). It's about writing and technology and food and other hungers, most of them sexual. It's about birds and bird watching of all kinds. A main theme is being disconnected with emerging technology. "Maybe our world had out-devised itself and only a few superior people could keep up with the world's speed," Cliff observes while he's in Oregon. "Everything in our culture seems to be marinating in the same plastic sack and the ingredients are deeply suspect," he ponders while in California. "I couldn't get rid of the idea that nature had had too much effect on my abilities to pan out in this world. I was old baloney bull who favored the far corner of the pasture where it merged into the forty-acre woodlot. A baloney bull is one that has outaged its effectiveness. You cart it into the slaughterhouse where it's turned into low-rent cold cuts," he ponders in "California V." The states fly by and Cliff wrestles with cell phones and GPS technology and fights it all. He's feisty, irascible and deeply in love with so many things, beginning with writing and his own sexual needs. He observes bartenders and waitresses and chronicles his intake of food. "The English Major" is the story of a more thoughtful and grown up "B.D." from "The Brown Dog," one of Harrison's best short stories. Cliff has the same swagger, the same interest in women. Cliff has a keen eye, a busy and conflicted heart and a passion for back roads and real food. As his gay son (a terrific character too) puts it: "Dad, you are on a great adventure and have been liberated to a new life." It's definitely worth going for the ride.

I gave this as a gift to a 61 year old who just lost his wife and packed up, took a road trip and moved across the country. He proclaimed it a very good read. "Seems like just yesterday I was reading coming-of-age novels, now I'm getting geezer fiction." But, with the thoughtfulness of the literary references and sweet overtone of the 'states' puzzle, it makes for a book to read lightly, then reflect on deeply.

Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall is one of my favorite reads and so I was curious to see how he would approach a more personal subject, in this case his own aging process. I was not disappointed. He tackles the subject by exploding the droll existence of his main character, 60-year-old Cliff, forcing him to move beyond his comfort zone which in this case means literally away from the strident wife who kicks him out of his farm and then out of Northern Michigan and into a Homeric journey of self-discovery. Harrison does this with marvelous humor, always poking fun at himself (Cliff) and at the social conventions that make up the world Cliff inhabits, i.e, the USA. Nothing is sacred here, including marriage, women, religion, diet, medicine, sexuality, substance abuse, minorities, and on and on as Cliff drives his dumpy car, an old geezer like himself, from state to state in his quest for a sense of identity. Cliff's parochial life as a farmer in a part of Michigan that seems more 1948 than 2008 allows him to react with naive disgust at the way people live in the real world of cities and traffic jams and sexual confusion and upward striving. Harrison is a master at describing the everyday routine of his characters in a way that fascinates. I particularly enjoyed Cliff's intimate relationships with animals -- his dog, an old pig, cows, fish, snakes, and a variety of birds. The critters seem more human than most of the people Cliff meets. Ultimately he winds up right back where he started as he learns to appreciate the importance of honoring his own likes (the simple life of a farmer) and dislikes (the complexities of modern life) and to hell with the rest of the world, including his ex-wife, his gay son, and a neurotic younger lover. This is a joy for the reader who is lucky enough to tag along for the ride.