The English Major

The English Major, by Jim Harrison is a delight from beginning to end. It's like a cold beer on a hot summer day, refreshing and slightly intoxicating.

Taking the template of the road novel, Harrison gives it a different spin--this is On the Road for the geriatric set. Our narrator is Cliff, a former teacher (and of course English major) and farmer from northern Michigan. At sixty his wife, who has become rich as a real estate agent, divorces him. He is forced to sell his farm and while sorting through his things he finds an old wooden jigsaw puzzle of the United States he had as a child. He is inspired to hit the road and visit all fifty states.

Cliff's motivation is to see if he can create a new life at an advanced age. A friend tells him that he is a "raccoon treed by the hounds of life," but Cliff disagrees, and sets out with a pioneer spirit. He decides he will work on a project of renaming all the states as well as the birds of North America. Along the way he recollects his past, good times and bad.

Of course there are complications. In Minnesota he meets up with an old student of his, now a slightly unhinged woman in her forties. They have great sex--Harrison isn't too proud to use language that usually appears in a Penthouse letter: "I was so hard you could have hung a pail on my dick." But Marybelle, his new flame, wears his pecker out, and though he enjoys the sex she drives him nuts, especially when she insists on him having a cell phone, which he looks at as a horror of modern life.

Cliff is a great creation, a pleasure to travel with as he makes his way through the West. He sticks mostly to the back roads, staying out of big cities, stopping to take nature hikes and snap photos of various types of cattle. He is overwhelmed by the Pacific Ocean. He visits his son in San Francisco and an old high school friend on a rattlesnake farm in Arizona. He sneaks across the border into Mexico and goes fishing in Montana. He goes trout fishing in Montana. He listens to NPR. There is a lot of drinking.

Harrison provides a lot of charming detail and peers into the soul of this man. Cliff describes many of his meals, and frequently has a soft spot for the waitress. In Montana he befriends a twenty-two-year-old waitress who is also an artists' model. Cliff, though embarrassed, pays her $300 to model naked for him, though she has a strict ten-foot buffer zone.

Though Cliff's days as a teacher are long behind him (he says he'd rather take a bullet to the brain rather than teach again) he always remembers the days when he thought books were important. He recalls Thoreau and Emerson, Emily Dickinson (who he loved) and Hart Crane (who he did not). In essence, it becomes apparent that once an English major, always an English major.

Harrison's writing is spare and fluid, tinged with the sentimental: "I was up at first light with a trace of dawn visible through the east kitchen window. I drank half of my coffee on the rickety back porch most of the floorboards of which I'd have to replace. I set off for a stroll with an imaginary dog at my side, my trousers soon wet to the knees with dew. I saw an indigo bunting flitting around a dogwood bush, possibly a bird not to be changed. I seem to be with the mute Indian inspecting a fox burrow in the southwest corner of the pasture. A Jersey milk 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 sits 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."