Professor Jason Fitger returns for another academic misadventure
Jason Fitger may be the last faculty member the dean wants for the job, but he’s the only professor available to chaperone Payne University’s annual “Experience: Abroad” (he has long been on the record objecting to the absurd and gratuitous colon between the words) occurring during the three weeks of winter term. Among his charges are a claustrophobe with a juvenile detention record, a student who erroneously believes he is headed for the Caribbean, a pair of unreconciled lovers, a set of undifferentiated twins, and one young woman who has never been away from her cat before.
Through a sea of troubles — personal, institutional, and international — the gimlet-eyed, acid-tongued Fitger strives to navigate safe passage for all concerned, revealing much about the essential need for human connection and the sometimes surprising places in which it is found.
This is one of my most-anticipated novels of the year. The first two in the series — Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement — are superb, and among my favourite reads of their respective release years, but also (in the case of the first) more generally. As I had no doubt that I would, I really enjoyed this.
In The English Experience, Professor Fitger finds himself appointed as the academic advisor/chaperone for the next term’s overseas experience cohort, despite being temperamentally absolutely unsuited to the gig. He’s joining mixed bag of students, drawn from a variety of departments and personalities, each with their own youth baggage: there’s a recently broken-up couple, a student who thought they were going to the Caribbean, a pair of artistic twins, a law student who sees injustice everywhere, a perennially absent mysterious student, and more. Over the course of a couple of weeks, Fitger must navigate England, these students’ eccentricities, and his own anxiety about his life, career, and relationship with his ex-wife.
The novel is predominantly told from Fitger’s perspective, interspersed with writing samples from his various students. This allows for some amusing observations about Fitger, education, writing, and England (although, there are a few too many tired asides about English cuisine — apparently, Schumacher has to include at least one cliché in each of her campus novels). Schumacher does a great job of giving each student a distinct personality and perspective on events and also on life in general.
There is plenty of commentary on contemporary university students: for example, the oft-woeful state of their writing, their unearned sense of entitlement, their inability to follow instructions. Anyone with any experience teaching will likely find plenty with which that they can related. However — and this is what sets this novel (and series) apart from other jaded campus fiction — Schumacher retains a sympathy and empathy for her younger characters. This was evident in the previous two books, as well: despite how aggravating some of them can be, we nevertheless catch glimpses of students who are trying, even doing their best, and also struggling. I won’t go into any details about which characters I’m talking about, or how the author invests them with pathos and depth, as this development is part of the novel’s major payoff. In other words, the cold academic cynicism is balanced nicely by a warm human compassion. By the end of the novel, I found myself rooting for everyone, and many of the final papers “excerpted” in the novel pointed towards growth and hope for many of the characters (including Fitger, as it happens).
In short, then: Julie Schumacher’s The English Experience is another excellent novel. It lived up to my expectations, and delivers everything that I loved about the first two books. It’s not the strongest of the three in the series (I think that remains Dear Committee Members), but if you are a fan of campus fiction then I think you’ll find a lot to love here.
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Julie Schumacher’s The English Experience is out now, published by Doubleday in North America and in the UK.
Also on CR: Reviews of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement
Civilian Reader 