My generation learned that one way to the self is through travel when we read Catcher in the Rye. Then, we read On the Road, and, later, Travels with Charley. Now part of the "new middle aged" group in their 60's, Jim Harrison provides us with The English Major.Cliff's wife got bored and ran off with a guy from their reunion. The farm fails. The son is on his own, living far away. The dog dies. Cliff does what our generation does: he hits the road, traveling from Michigan west. He lives with all of the Cliffs of his 60 years as he drives. He meets some people, does some things...but really, this is about getting centered again by taking off.Harrison is a good writer. I will read him again. Jim Harrison has a voice like no other. Someone writing for the New York Times once stated that Harrison represents "a unique voice in American letters." Believe it or not, this is not just the slick grist of back-cover blurbs... this time I'm here to testify that it's a fact. Harrison is unique. As a writer and an artist he has created something that is his, and only his: a wry, knowing, salty-dog, generous, learned, willing-to-learn, Tabasco sauce-in-your-pocket with run-on sentence galore VOICE.It's also true that at this point in his writing career, Harrison's voice is all he's got. But the dirty truth is that much to the contrary of what creative writing teachers and literary agents will tell you, novels are usually memorable not for the plot or the character development (yes of course those will keep us turning the pages) but for the voice of the writer. A great plot with no voice gets you Dan Brown. No complaints from his literary agent and publisher of course. Great characters with no plot get your sit-com canned after one season. Voice is the thing, and Jim Harrison has got major bucketloads of the stuff.The English Major is an on-the-road novel. Which means, Harrison uses the tropes of the road novel to further excercise his unique voice. And that's a good thing. He never really digs into the main character wanting to visit all 50 states motif, which I think could've been a winner, but it doesn't matter. We get Cliff, spry-wise-literate... but with so much to learn... and willing to learn... tooling around from Midwest to Northwest, straying into California and Arizona. There are sexual adventures, there are realistically kooky family members, there are depressingly realistic leechy friends, there is Cliff with his pros and cons, and there is Jim Harrison breathing life into it all with his winning run-on sentences.The theme is change. You can change. You do change. Even at sixty. In Harrison's world, sixty is the new thirty-eight. This is the middle-age crisis. And a middle-age crisis at sixty, with Harrison's god-given voice, means fun. I mean, it means CHANGE. You can change. You can change the names of the states, the names of the state birds and the goofy state mottoes. Or sometimes you can forget to change them, as Cliff often does, while getting drunk in hotel bars and chatting up waitresses, ignoring the cell phone calls from his estranged family.But then change does happen. We live it through Cliff. He lives through his road adventure, he accumulates memories (to do with unspeakably beautiful American landscapes and gaping at the beauty of all things feminine) and then he goes home. It's where he wanted to be, after all.Towards the end, Cliff wishes he could look at a cow and not think of the word "cow." An adept and relevant point to the re-naming the states and birds theme, vaguely referencing Wittgenstein and David Foster Wallace. I was moved and intellectually stimulated by that seemingly throw-away phrase. And I couldn't help but wish that Harrison, with the immense talent of his voice, had taken up the theme with all his heart in "The English Major."
What do You think about Une Odyssée Américaine (2010)?
"Birds shouldn't have to suffer the humiliation of being named after people."
—sammy
Amusing reading, I think best for the over 50 crowd.
—scleveland
Part Kerouac, part Roth, part McCarthy, all great.
—IAmRahaf
