Books
FICTION: Better Off Without a Wife
Jim Harrison, The English Major (Grove, 2008)
According to a recent interview with Jim Harrison published in the New York Times, the author writes more novels than his current publisher knows what to do with. The latest, The English Major, was penned while his last book was under editing. His subjects are simple and continuous throughout most of his work, and tension is developed through the protagonists’ self-exploration: hunting and fishing vs. literature, solitude vs. friendship and romance, and being old-fashioned in a fast new world. And always food; food and lust. Unlike Cormac McCarthy, his themes center on the flesh more than the spiritual, and he tells his stories with a straightforward candor that puts the reader directly across from him at a table in a middle-American diner. Sometimes considered a regional author of the upper Midwest (though he and his wife now divide their time between Montana and Arizona, two places that comprise much of the latest book’s setting), his books have a national appeal because they are quintessentially American.

The English Major begins fast and furious; Cliff, the protagonist, comes right to the point like a guy with something to get off his chest. He is a simple man with a deep emotional core and some grieving to overcome, because at 60 years old his wife of 38 years has just left him for a crush from high-school days, not to mention sold his farm and skimmed off his retirement share. Plus his dog died, and he feared he’d dispatched her himself with his truck’s rear tire. But he’s already feeling better, because a neighbor showed him evidence that the dog died on her own, and also he’s recently come across an old jigsaw puzzle of the United States, which gives him the idea to get on the road and see the whole country for the first time. What follows is a chronicle of self-examination along with a good bit of heartache and adventure.
Cliff recalls the central character of Farmer, Harrison’s 1976 novel about an English teacher named Joseph who inherited a farm that he’s kept fallow while pursuing other diversions. Aside from long excursions into the woods, Joseph has a rich affair with a 17-year-old student who awakens his deepest lust and eventually sends him back to his widowed lover and life-long love. Cliff, who once taught high school classes before tending full-time to the farm, is almost 20 years older than Joseph, is in many ways the same man but no longer holds all the cards to his fate. But spurred by the jigsaw puzzle and the new reality of no home, he makes use of what he has, and discovers potential for his own sexual rejuvenation with a former student, now in her forties, with whom he’d always been smitten.
The sex is first described with great satisfaction and then fatigue and disinterest. Cliff is a man who has been rendered alone, and wants to feel that way. He becomes dedicated to a project of renaming all of the country’s states, and also attempts to rename every state bird and flower, a calling to which he begins to think of himself as an artist, and delves further into the way he’d seen his literary heroes as an English student at Michigan State. He even hires a waitress in Montana to pose nude for him under the pretense that he would sketch her. There is an obvious amount of poking fun here, and Harrison referred to this novel in last year’s Times profile as an illustration of “all those preposterous people who major in English,” but the continuity of character traits from past works and the alignment of interests and passions with the author’s own (gourmandizing, the outdoors, laments on the nation’s direction) suggests something deeper and closer to home.
Contributor
David VarnoDAVID VARNO's writing has appeared in BOMB, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Electric Literature, Paste, Tin House, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
from The Ones Who Listen (Book One of the Cywanu Trilogy)
By Whit GriffinAPRIL 2023 | Poetry
Whit Griffin is a poet-medium and semi-professional hermit dwelling in Colorado. Author of such nonlinear metaphysical epics as We Who Saw Everything (Cultural Society) and Uncanny Resonance (Book Two, Lunar Chandelier Collective). With visual artist Timothy C. Ely he collaborated on the book Interior Voice / The Great Practice (Granary Books). Along with Eric Baus he is a resident wizard at Common Name Farm, through which he freely gives away visionary elixirs.

Helen Dewitts
The English Understand Wool
By John Domini
DEC 22–JAN 23 | Books
New Directions has issued Helen Dewitts brief new fiction as a stand-alone text, one of their StorybookND series, a handsome little package. Once its unwrapped, though, out springs a midsummers night dream, a turbulent and amoral comedy, disrupting the sleep with its dodges and masksaltogether a delight. The English Understand Wool offers another spin snowball of a narrative, gathering weight as it slaloms the hills of Dewitts imagination.
from The Nature Book
By Tom ComittaMARCH 2023 | Fiction
Darwin discovered that evolution proceeds with neither direction nor purpose. The natural world is largely indifferent to plan or plot. Yet we, story-seeking creatures that we are, see the world around us as more completed, more accomplished, than what came before. Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book explores these tensions by stitching together hundreds of fragments in the history of literary writing about the natural worldthis excerpt alone is a collage of ninety-seven novels ranging from Hawthorne to Arundhati Roy. Though the text of The Nature Book is a polyphonic effort of writers, humans are absent from the actual story. In this seamless anthology, we forget that the experience of reading about nature is mediated by human voices and, when suspended in the text, succumb to the magical illusion that we are perceiving the world in itself.
Center for Book Arts
By Megan N. LibertyMARCH 2023 | ArTonic
Wandering around the flower district of Manhattan, you may be surprised to see a green flag hanging high above the flowers, signaling the location of the Center for Book Arts (CBA) on the third floor, where it has been located since 1999. As artist and designer Ben Denzer recently wrote to me, Despite coming and going to CBA all the time, I can never really get over how much of an unexpected gem it is. The fact that this book utopia is hiding on the third floor of a random building on 27th street has always made me look at all NYC buildings as if each might contain delightful secrets inside.