Globe and Mail, Canada

Alone again, unnaturally

STEPHEN AMIDON

THE ENGLISH MAJOR

By Jim Harrison

Anansi, 255 pages, $29.95

It is sometimes tempting to think that all those traffic jams on U.S. highways are caused by the large number of fictional characters out there in search of themselves. The Joads in their rickety pickup lumbering along in the slow lane; Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in that 1950 Cadillac, hogging the fast lane; Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic father and son blocking the shoulder with their shopping cart – it’s a wonder you can get anywhere with all those protagonists hogging the road.

Cliff, the hero of Jim Harrison’s new novel, adds to this heavy traffic. Having recently been abandoned by his wife of 38 years, the schoolteacher-turned-farmer decides to sell his Michigan farm and hit the road. His wife, Vivian, it turns out, left him for a high school sweetheart she hooked up with at their 40th reunion. “Now I’m free, white, and sixty,” Cliff complains, “but I don’t want to be free.”

The journey he undertakes is quixotic, to say the least. Piloting a brown Taurus with nearly 250,000 miles on it, Cliff intends to wander the country using a childhood puzzle as his map. “I decided to take the jigsaw puzzle of the United States and throw a piece out when I crossed the border into a new state.” On the way, he plans to rename each state, as well as conjure new names for the country’s several thousand species of birds.

His trek soon goes awry when he collects a former student named Marybelle, who is unhappily married to an archeologist in Minnesota. They begin a torrid romance that tests the limits of Cliff’s aging body as well as his patience. In addition to being addicted to her cellphone, the 43-year-old Marybelle also shows delusional tendencies, especially when it becomes clear that the son she claims is living in Africa does not exist. Before too long, Cliff even grows tired of their unbridled lovemaking. “Forty-five years of sex fantasies come true and I’m thinking that I wish I could go fishing.”

He winds up depositing Marybelle with his gay son in San Francisco so she can pursue a life in the theatre. He presses on to Arizona, where he hooks up with his old friend Bert, owner and operator of a snake farm. After things there go predictably wrong, Cliff beats a hasty retreat to Montana, where he holes up in a cabin on the Yellowstone River to complete his renaming project.

While there, Cliff comes to understand what the reader has suspected since the rubber first hit the road: “It came to me that I wasn’t in first-rate mental shape when I had left Michigan, and perhaps for some time afterwards.” A disastrous visit from an old doctor friend sends him high-tailing it back to Michigan, where he is forced to confront a marriage that might not be quite as dead as he thought.

Although that hectic plot summary might set the hearts of Harrison’s fans beating faster, The English Major turns out to be a surprisingly low-key affair. Although Harrison’s familiar themes of wounded machismo, Western wanderlust and native American tragedy are present, they are dealt with in a perfunctory manner. Even set pieces as richly promising as that visit to the snake farm, or the arrival of a voluptuous nude model at Cliff’s isolated cabin, peter out without really catching fire. There is something oddly fitting about the fact that his journey turns out to be both truncated and circular.

The English Major proves far more effective as a study of the limits of solitude. Cliff is a fine character whose irascible, raunchy, self-lacerating voice grabs you right from the start. His big journey through life started with collegiate idealism: “We English majors of a serious bent are susceptible to high ideals we paste on our lives like decals.” But after an unhappy spell as a junior high school teacher, he retreated to the land, which allowed him spend year after year alone with his thoughts, only to discover that there was precious little solace or clarity in them.

His failed journey teaches him the folly of his cheap imitation of Thoreau. “I began to wonder what we are when we are alone. Maybe we don’t count for much unless we are rubbing against others.” The novel ends with Cliff joining a group of geriatric birdwatchers, only to get into a squabble with them that results in him almost getting brained with a cane. Cliff may be returning to the realm of human contact – though it seems clear that in his case this will usually mean rubbing people the wrong way.