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Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..Home > Blogs > Book Nook > Archives > 2008 > October > 12 > Entry
falling over a Cliff…
“The English Major” by Jim Harrison, (Grove Press, 255 pages, $24).
“It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.”
This opening line from Jim Harrison’s novel “The English Major” expresses the blunt reality of how a life can get turned upside down.
“The English Major” is written from Cliff’s perspective. As the story begins he describes how his life was thrown all topsy turvy. At their 40th high school reunion, Vivian rekindled her passion for an old flame.
Cliff, a former school teacher, was growing cherries on a farm on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Their marriage fell apart. Cliff lost the farm. His dog died. Suddenly untethered, Cliff embarks on an epic journey across America in his junker car.
He heads west. There isn’t much of a plot here. The reader is seduced by Harrison’s ornery narrator. Cliff brings along a jigsaw puzzle of the United States. Whenever he crosses another state border he discards the puzzle piece for the state he’s just left.
The trip allows Cliff the luxury to ponder his existence. He recalls warning signals ignored. ” I didn’t pay attention over a year ago when she looked up from her Robert Ludlum spy book and said, ‘You look so forgettable, you’d make a good spy.”
In Minnesota, he picks up Marybelle, a former student. Initially they get along well but after a few hundred miles she is driving Cliff nuts, talking constantly on her cell phone, annoying him to no end.
Harrison’s characterization of his cranky narrator is marvelous. The road trip shifts his memory to the man he once was. “Marybelle joked that I sounded like I had been in long-term parking for 25 years. My feelings were a little hurt and when we stopped to bury the North Dakota jigsaw piece under a rock in the austere landscape my mind wandered back 40 years to when my brain was so alive I could barely sleep.”
Cliff takes a circuitous route to San Francisco to visit his gay son, a successful location scout in the film industry. In California, Cliff’s long suffering vehicle expires. “I had just pulled off the freeway in Sausalito and was near the former home of my boyhood hero Jack London when Ron died. Ron is the private name of my 13-year-old Ford Taurus with just short of 250,000 miles on it. The actual Ron was a high school friend who died when his tractor (a John Deere) tipped over backward on top of him while he was pulling out a stump.”
As Cliff coasts to a fading halt inside the dying Ron, he meets a man with “the name ‘Fred” on his shirt pocket.” Cliff says to Fred: “I think my car has gone to heaven.”
If you enjoy reading a book that takes you to lots of fascinating places with minimal fuss, then you must check out “The English Major.” Jim Harrison writes fiction that feels so real you can believe that he has lived every moment of it. And perhaps he has.
Vick Mickunas
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