"The English Major", Jim Harrison
"The English Major" is classified as fiction and no doubt the story on the surface is, but the book is less of any kind of structured novel than just 250 pages of the mind of Jim Harrison. It's a road trip by a 60 year old 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 his bearings. The story sometimes begs for an edit, it wanders and repeats, themes surface, disappear, and then are reconstituted, and none of that matters much 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 part of the fabric of the narrator'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 of the world."
"Normal people don't try to be normal people, they're just hopelessly normal people."
"Reality seemed to be crumbling and I was wise enough to understand that reality stayed the same so it was my mind that was crumbling."
"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 a sudden troubling thought that nobody seems to know much of anything."
For the most part not exactly Mark Twain quotables but within the book they really sneak up and work. The most often repeated theme was "the farmer doesn't own the farm, the farm owns the farmer" which is pretty much the narrators concept of life as a whole as well. But as he is mired in his travels in the rural midwest 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.
Harrison can write with what seems like such unrestrained free flowing confidence I guess because he is a larger than life character himself in some ways. In the non-fiction "Heat" by Bill Buford(wonderful book about restaurants, crazy cooks, New York, the history of Italian cooking back to the 13th century etc.) there is a scene described in which Jim Harrison shows up in New York and he, Mario Batali, and Buford go out to dinner and share between them 28 bottles of wine, intermittant grappas and cognac, and forty different food orders over eight hours, talking all the time. Harrison, however, "turns down an oyster because he had recently eaten 144 of them at once, testing the calculation that a gross of oysters, less their shells, was only about three pounds of meat. Harrison, having performed the task, 'could not recommend the practice'." In fact, word is that he is bigger than most of his characters.
The jacket photo shows a man who has not obsessed over a youthful appearance, sort of a Keith Richards of the written word. I enjoyed the book immensely.
"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 of the world."
"Normal people don't try to be normal people, they're just hopelessly normal people."
"Reality seemed to be crumbling and I was wise enough to understand that reality stayed the same so it was my mind that was crumbling."
"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 a sudden troubling thought that nobody seems to know much of anything."
For the most part not exactly Mark Twain quotables but within the book they really sneak up and work. The most often repeated theme was "the farmer doesn't own the farm, the farm owns the farmer" which is pretty much the narrators concept of life as a whole as well. But as he is mired in his travels in the rural midwest 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.
Harrison can write with what seems like such unrestrained free flowing confidence I guess because he is a larger than life character himself in some ways. In the non-fiction "Heat" by Bill Buford(wonderful book about restaurants, crazy cooks, New York, the history of Italian cooking back to the 13th century etc.) there is a scene described in which Jim Harrison shows up in New York and he, Mario Batali, and Buford go out to dinner and share between them 28 bottles of wine, intermittant grappas and cognac, and forty different food orders over eight hours, talking all the time. Harrison, however, "turns down an oyster because he had recently eaten 144 of them at once, testing the calculation that a gross of oysters, less their shells, was only about three pounds of meat. Harrison, having performed the task, 'could not recommend the practice'." In fact, word is that he is bigger than most of his characters.
The jacket photo shows a man who has not obsessed over a youthful appearance, sort of a Keith Richards of the written word. I enjoyed the book immensely.
posted by John Borden at 9:16 PM
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