The English Experience (2023) Julie Schumacher
Good Reads meta-data is 230 pages, rated 3.90 by 2481 litizens.
Genre: Fiction.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: More Jay, please.
Tagline: Murphy explains it all.
The unwilling and unwelcome chair of the English Department of Payne State University, Jay, backs into another unwanted assignment. He is to escort a dozen Payne undergraduates on a three-week study tour of England. It’s only three weeks: what can go wrong, so he consoles himself.
Then the sea of troubles – personal, institutional, and international – strike, one after another. There is no respite. Will Jay never learn?
One of the students did not read the brochure beyond the word ‘British,’ and thought the tour was to the British Cayman Islands. Yeah no one else can understand how that worked, but he showed up at the airport in shorts with diving gear for a January trip to London, the one in England. He now considers suing the University for false advertising.
Another participant does not like to talk about his sealed police record, and so he brings it up repeatedly. When, as a result, others begin to avoid him, he expects Jay to overcome this ostracism or he will give him a bad rating.
The identical twins are, well, identical and inseparable, though separate. Jay can’t tell them apart, and he gradually realizes they, being well aware of that, exploit it to confuse him further, albeit he starts pretty confused.
Then there is DB who apparently missed the flight and yet appeared, briefly, at the London residence, only to disappear again. Oh, and no one knows what ‘DB’ stands for.
Another student has never before been away from home, and her cat, and pines for the latter every minute. She believes in sharing this pining with Jay.
Then there is Boadicea who approaches everything as Armageddon. She categorically refuses to comply with any of Jay’s few and lax requirements mainly because ‘all requirements are gendered.’ Patriarchy must be denied!
But the peculiarities of these students pales into insignificance when the remainder of the party is considered.
Although the dozen students all signed up for the excursion and paid for it, none of them intend to follow the prescribed program, still less write the reports Jay set, and that is fine since he had little interest in reading them. Every step of the way it is a test of wills, and at sixty years of age Jay’s will has been eroded by the tests that have gone before it. Most recently with the Provost to get a budget for his department, which has been on death row for some time. Few of its members will survive the killing fields of the next budget round. But like deer in hunting season, most of his colleagues are unaware of the calendar. He hopes, no doubt vainly, that taking this assignment will earn his department a stay of execution for another budget cycle. Rumour has it that the Provost has negotiated a new contract with a salary greater than the combined salaries of all sixteen members of the English Department. Hmmm.
If you don’t know Jay, start with Dear Committee Member, the first of the three novels chronicling his woes. Then continue with the Shakespeare Requirement, before getting to this one.
Some readers of these books might think them satirical, but I can assure such readers that they have a core of verisimilitude. This conclusion is contrary to some of the more sanctimonious reviews on Good Reads.
I gulped this one down in a day and a night.