The English Major: A Novel
by Jim Harrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jim HarrisonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-01
ISBN: 0802118631
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of The English Major: A Novel
Book Review: Meandering through the mind of Jim Harrison
Summary: 5 Stars
"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 rewarding book for those with the inclination to appreciate Harrison's style. Apparently many do, as vacationing and walking past a Rue Cler book stall several weeks ago this book was already there, translated into French.
Summary of The English Major: A Novel
"It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn't." With these words, Jim Harrison sends his sixty-something protagonist, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America, armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds to overcome the banal names men have given them. Cliff's 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 in San Francisco.
The English Major is the map of a man's journey into?and out of?himself, and it is vintage Harrison?reflective, big-picture American, and replete with wicked wit.
The English Major is the map of a man's journey into?and out of?himself, and it is vintage Harrison?reflective, big-picture American, and replete with wicked wit.
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