By GWEN FLORIO of the Missoulian
It ought to be easy to dislike the narrator of “The English Major.”
Not to mention the fact that it takes the 60-year-old Cliff about a minute to find himself a 17-years-younger traveling companion with whom he has lots of hot sex while on a road trip designed to ease his pain. From the way Cliff carries on, you'd think he'd invented the midlife crisis.
Thing is, it's impossible to dismiss
the guy.
For starters, the younger woman in question is such a royal pain, always yammering on her cell phone and psychoanalyzing him and everyone else in her life, that one quickly comes to agree with Cliff that even the hottest midlife-crisis sex isn't worth this kind of aggravation.
He soon ceases to think of the lissome Marybelle as “Spring herself” and warns himself: “You be careful. This isn't Heidi or Mary Poppins sitting next to you.” And within a few short sentences, he thinks, “There is the idea that I might dip Marybelle's cell phone in the toilet or a full sink while she sleeps.”
Amen, Cliff.
The guy is just a mess. And, well, that's the point. So is midlife. And nobody expresses this - as well as the pain and confusion that this realization causes - better than Harrison's Cliff, an English major-turned teacher-turned farmer married to a housewife-turned real estate agent-turned runaway wife named Vivian.
“The last thing I expected was that my fifty-eight-year-old wife would become wayward,” Cliff muses. That's the problem with midlife: Right about the time you relax into a comfortable routine, the strains of child-rearing and young marriage and career ladder-climbing largely behind you, life throws you a curve or three. Spouses stray. Pink slips appear on your desk. Markets collapse. And dogs die - that last providing, in Cliff's case, a thread of pure sorrow throughout “The English Major.” It is, in fact, one of the few pure emotions Cliff experiences.
Everything else is muddled - his yearning for the wife who fled, his love/hate affair with the mercurial Marybelle, his affectionate but conflicted relationship with his overbearing son, and his hair-pulling frustration with the technology that gets in the way of the simple, head-clearing escape he'd planned with his road trip and a whimsical project to rename birds and states. Just when there's an unfortunate - and about-time - event involving the cell phone, what should rear its intrusive head but OnStar.
It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but “The English Major” is straightforward about the mess and muddle. So Cliff misses his wife, lusts after Marybelle even as he is increasingly repelled by her, thinks randy thoughts about waitresses in roadside cafes, makes oddly tentative overtures to an-even-younger-than-Marybelle woman he meets in Livingston and, oh yeah, did we mention that he really, really misses his wife?
All of these contradictions play out on an extended jaunt around the West and Southwest, with much of the trip taking place in Montana, where Harrison lives for part of the year.
In the process, Cliff makes some sense of things - or, rather comes to the conclusion that he'd better make his peace with the fact that things don't make sense, much, and likely never will.
Lecturing himself, he says, “ ‘I have no more time for self-doubt, which is a profession in itself for English majors. I must follow my star, even if it turns out to be one of those squiggly motes floating through my eyeball.' Š I thought how preposterous it was that anyone would try to paste a decal of sanity on our time.”
Amen, Cliff. Amen.
Missoulian city editor Gwen Florio can be reached at (406) 523-5268 or by e-mail at gwen.florio@lee.net.
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