Jim Harrison is a writer who always pleases. His most recent book, The English Major (published 2008), is a mellow but still crazy after all these years road trip tale, enjoyable from beginning to finish.
In The English Major, Harrison continues his funny and sometimes caustic explorations of sex, literature, family relationships, Nature, and the flash of modern life. His hero is sixty and recently divorced, an ex-farmer, ex-English teacher, and ex-English major. Determined to visit the states he dreamed about as a child when he put together a wooden puzzle of the United States, colored state by colored state, Cliff starts out on a road trip. He has an ordered plan of passing through each state and tossing the puzzle piece of the window when the visit is through. His plan is blown way off course by the unexpected addition of an ex-student as fellow passenger and wild love machine.
Sex is a big theme here; the nature of it, why men want it, women too, and why the heck does desire flame and fizzle out and then reappear again. Sometimes the “worm” moves just because of a broad backed waitress who beams (“not many women beam”). Desire and its manifestation in the active male organ is a strange nut to crack (no pun intended). Given our overabundant population, why aren’t we evolving out of sexual desire? Why does it still torment and tease, and what is the promise that sex still holds for so many, so many years later and longer? As AD (“alcoholic doctor”, one of Harrison’s funny and often on target philosophizers) says: “The only real adventure in most people’s lives is adultery.” I hope that is not true. Read a book, go for a walk, love someone out loud: that is adventurous living.
One of the goals of our trying-to-wander hero is to rename the birds of America, as well as the states. Why? Does renaming alter the interior truth? Cliff argues that the nut hatch should be renamed the banker’s bird because of the way it hoards thousands of tiny seeds away for the winter. I think it might be better to rename bankers, nut hatches. Now that sounds good.
Harrison has some really funny rifts on cell phones and traffic, romance and conspiracy novels, and food (great descriptions of food, made my mouth water). He can be so funny in his accuracy: Cliff imagines an old voyeur, caught in the act of self-pleasure, saying, “Oops.”
There are also breathtaking moments of sighting a bird, being loved by a dog, and feeling crushed by the immensity of stars at night. Harrison is still awed by the big and the little. His hero (and I have to believe, Harrison himself ) finds joy both in Emily Dickinson and in the bare fanny of a twenty-something girl. Cliff is awed by the Pacific ocean (“The ocean became the best smell of my life” )and by a creek under trees, muddied by his dog’s wanderings. Harrison creates those moments so realistically, with no sentimentality, that we stand beside him and understand the joy and the awe (frankly for me, Emily wins over a butt but there are certain hormonal addled days — evolution again — when I can find both amazing, and I will always love Lake Michigan best over any ocean).
With just a few sentences Harrison can sum up a lovely and engaging thought, as when Cliff says, “Back in grade school when I started trout fishing with my dad he told me that gods and spirits lived in creeks and rivers, information he got from his own father’s Chippewa buddy. I never doubted this one bit. Where else would they live?” Makes sense to me too.
Harrison can use expressions like “with a glad heart” and make them fresh again and expressions like hungry enough “to eat the ass out of a sow” and make us laugh, and understand hunger again. By the way, he makes the best argument for farm raised pork I’ve ever read with his frequent experiences of the fake versus the real ham thing. And I don’t even eat pork!
The English Major is a good book, a good read.
