Book Review: ‘The English Experience’ Is a Witty Academic Farce

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In “The English Experience,” author Julie Schumacher, who teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota, takes readers to London with the 63-year-old English professor Jason Fitger and 11 very different Payne University undergrads for a three-week “Experience Abroad.” “The English Experience,” available Aug. 15, is Schumacher’s third novel focusing on academic misadventures and it features her melodic sentences and trademark witticisms.

This is a character-driven novel, and Schumacher flexes her creative muscles in her creation of the undergraduates. First, there is Felicity Babinec, a cat lover who has never been far from her feline. Shallow Wyatt Franklin “erroneously believes he headed for the Caribbean.” Lin Jen Snow, a pre-law major, believes the trip will focus on “young white Americans losing their virginity and learning how to use the salad fork.” Then there’s basketball-obsessed Brent Schraft, who recently cheated on his girlfriend Sonia Morales, also on the trip. And Joe Ballo, who sleepwalks and is claustrophobic, confesses, through a paper, about his police record. D.B. Melnyk makes the trip but abandons his class for solo excursions to Paris and Budapest.

According to Fitger’s ex-wife, the students were in trouble before they left. “You’re hardly nurturing,” she tells Fitger in the book. “You don’t typically like students [and] you don’t like England.

It is the tours—and hijinks—as well as Fitger’s interactions with his ex-wife that move the plot. In London, Schumacher treats readers to tours of Oxford, Stonehenge, Bath, and the British Museum, which the group tours without Fitger as he nurses a sprained ankle. However, he does experience the museum through the students’ delightful papers. Babinec observes the significance of the museum’s famous Gayer-Anderson Egyptian cat statue: “Cats have more dignity than dogs and are more polite.”

At the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, “Brent paused to ask a woman in Regency dress for her opinion on the NBA All-Star Teams,” and Lin, “was organizing a thumb-wrestling competition.” Cloaked beneath this farce is a story about two people looking for companionship and 11 young adults finding their way in life. It’s never too late, and Schumacher illustrates this when a student turns in her paper more than three years overdue.