The English Major

Har­rison opens his novel with a loaded declar­ative sen­tence: “It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.” The story is told in Cliff’s voice and it is a voice that is pitch perfect. Here’s a guy, married almost thirty-​​eight years, whose wife leaves him for an old high school beau she recon­nects with when she and Cliff attend their 40^th high school reunion. Cliff is dev­as­tated and does not want the divorce, “I want Vivian back but it’s been made clear to me that this is unlikely to happen.” Poor Cliff. Well, maybe.

A little back­ground, if you please. Cliff, as the title tells us, was an English major and after he and Vivian marry they return to Mullet Lake, Michigan, where he teaches high school English at their alma mater. But he quits teaching after ten years, puts his English major per­sonae on ice, and takes up running the small family farm owned by Vivian’s parents. Cliff is a natural at farming. He loves the fruit trees, the cattle, the pigs, his dog Lola and Vivian. The years pass, the farm flour­ishes, their son grad­uates from college and finds a career in San Fran­cisco. Cliff pulls at our heart­strings when he says, “The last thing I expected was that my fifty-​​eight year old wife would become wayward.”

It is enough to know that Cliff loses it all, wife, farm and even Lola. He decides to travel across the U.S., from Michigan to Cal­i­fornia where he plans to visit his son who lives in San Fran­cisco. Along the way, Cliff stops to visit a favorite high school student he has kept in touch with for more than twenty years. She is no longer under-​​age and Cliff is as ripe as the orchard fruit he no longer owns. Mary­belle joins Cliff on his travels, intending to leave him in Montana where her arche­ol­ogist husband and son are working on a college dig. Cliff lives the out old adage, “be careful of what you wish for.”

Har­rison has written the perfect on-​​the-​​road book for those over fifty. His mile by mile sexual exploits are not just funny, but also sweet, sad and filled with enough insight to keep the pages flying. Just when you think it can’t go any further (and farther), Har­rison lets Chris out of Marybelle’s clutches long enough to look at the scenery, appre­ciate the local flora and fauna, and with an aging inno­cense com­ments, “Rivers make my favorite sound.”

We learn about State flowers, State birds and enough of Cliff’s phi­losophy of renaming each that the whole thing begins to make sense. I won’t give away the ending, but Cliff reaches San Fran­cisco after depositing Mary­belle in Montana. His son fills him in on Vivian and her rela­tionship that is foundering. We travel with Cliff back across the states as he heads to Michigan with Mary­belle only a cell phone call away.

Vivian is a char­acter also worthy of our sym­pathy and under­standing. Long term rela­tion­ships do not die easily. Early on in the story, Cliff, in a bar, listens to two ranchers swapping tales and thinks, “These fellows reminded me of the old days, my father’s gen­er­ation, when stories were told slowly and savored.” How lucky for us that Jim Har­rison remembers that gen­er­ation. The English Major, read slowly and savor.