?It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn't.? With these words Jim Harrison begins a riotous moving novel that sends a sixty-something man on a quest of self-rediscovery. Newly divorced and robbed of his farm by his real-estate shark of an ex-wife Cliff is off on a road trip across America on a mission to rename all the states and state birds to overcome the banal names men have given them.
Cliff's adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high school teaching days twenty-some years before to a snake farm in Arizona owned by an old classmate and to the high-octane existence of his son a big-time movie producer. A map of a man?s journey into?and out of?himself The English Major is vintage Harrison: reflective big-picture American and replete with wicked wit.
