'The English Experience' is the perfect back-to-school novel for cynics
In her 2014 novel, “Dear Committee Members,” a witty, excruciatingly believable satire of academic life, Julie Schumacher introduced us to Jason Fitger, an unhappily divorced professor of English and creative writing at a fictional college aptly named Payne University. An embattled, atrophying enclave, the English department is notorious for its internal enmities and overall dysfunction, its faculty “busy tending to personal grudges like scraps of carrion on which they gnaw in the gloom of their offices.” Schumacher, as it happens, also teaches English and creative writing – in her case at the University of Minnesota – and is clearly well versed in the sort of academic turf wars, departmental infighting and strutting egos that have contributed so much to Prof. Fitger’s sour disposition and misanthropic outlook.
“The English Experience” completes Schumacher’s trilogy exploring the life, times and tribulations of our long-suffering anti-hero. The opening volume – which became the first book by a woman to win the Thurber Prize for American Humor – consists entirely of Fitger’s letters and memos, documents marked by varying degrees of umbrage and futility. Among them are ineffectual, ingratiating letters to his ex-wife, Janet, and letters of recommendation for students, past and present, some pleading, some exasperated, some involving completing online forms – one of Fitger’s many bêtes noires. Most anguished, however, are Fitger’s fruitless letters of protest about the destruction raining down on the English department as the economics department on the floor above is refurbished in grand style, its faculty rehoused in comfort elsewhere, while English crouches below in the rubble.
The second volume, “The Shakespeare Requirement” (2018), is a straightforward narrative and even more cuttingly funny than its predecessor. Fitger is now in the horrifying position of chair of Payne’s English department, and his troubles are legion. Chief among them: the imperial ambitions of the economics department, which has annexed English’s conference room under the generalship of its unctuous chair, Roland Gladwell, a megalomaniac who, even now, plans further advances on English territory. Added to this, Fitger has the impossible task of inveigling his rancorous department members into signing off on a statement of mission. Finally, there is the galling fact that his ex-wife is conducting an affair with the dean of the College of Arts and Science, a man with considerable power over the fortunes of the English department.
Fitger’s final foray, “The English Experience,” takes him out of the mean halls of Payne and sends him, appalled and protesting, off to England to shepherd a pack of students for “Experience: Abroad.” This is a threeweek program of supposed cultural enrichment that Fitger has always opposed, not least “because of the absurd and gratuitous colon between the words ‘experience’ and ‘abroad.’”
So here he is at 63, “a wintry Methuselah” reading 10 applications for “Experience: England” - there should be 11, but, in timehonored fashion, one student has failed to submit anything. One applicant requests that her ex-boyfriend be stricken from the list; one much-afflicted young man confesses to being claustrophobic and having a criminal past; another writes of his enthusiasm for visiting the Cayman Islands, the class’s destination as he understands it. (“Please let me know if I will need my own snorkeling gear.”) One practical-minded student notes that he is “a business major . . . for obvious reasons. There are no jobs out there for people who just want to read.” Further cavils, personal limitations, medical and psychological conditions, and special requirements are also voiced. All in all, things are off to a promisingly dismal start.
As is his way, Fitger plans to keep his distance from the students outside class time, “but no matter how standoffish he strove to be, they sought him out to confide in him or ply him with questions. Was chicken considered meat? Did Fitger play poker, and did he have any chips?” What follows is a series of set pieces illustrating Fitger’s ill-starred custodial and educational efforts. There is the chance meeting with a former colleague and suspected former lover of his ex-wife, now black-gowned and lordly, strolling among Oxford’s dreaming spires. There is a contretemps with a museum guard kitted out as a Roman centurion. And there are, above all, the students with their inanities and self-involvement, young people toward whom Fitger feels, in the end, despairing compassion: It’s hardly their fault that they are growing up marinated in triviality and self-centeredness, the major ingredients of American youth culture.
It must be said that “The English Experience” cannot be appreciated without having read the previous volumes, and, while entertaining and bittersweet, it is not as mordantly funny as its predecessors. But those of us who have followed Jason Fitger through the pages of those wonderfully sharp, witty comedies will want to learn the professor’s fate. And that is, in its small, melancholy way, an illustration of the fate of the humanities in the 21st century: Dumped upon, pushed to the side, ranks dwindling – and still stubbornly limping along.