Review: A professor and hapless students visit London in 'The English Experience.' What could go wrong?

Jason (Jay) Fitger, hapless chair of a beleaguered English department at a third-rate university, is tapped at the last minute to teach a three-week "Experience: England" course, working from the syllabus of a colleague recently removed from class in a straitjacket. Need I add that the students are profoundly immature and each at least somewhat cuckoo? Oh, and that Jay has an aversion to England, born of an unfortunate vacation there with his then-wife?

What could go wrong? If it's a novel in Julie Schumacher's series about Fitger's flailing career at Payne University (T-shirt: "Payne, where education hurts"), pretty much everything — to comic effect.

The first in the series, "Dear Committee Members," was downright hilarious, garnering the Thurber Prize for American humor for Schumacher, the first woman so honored. The second, "The Shakespeare Requirement," was also very funny, if not quite as uproarious. While maintaining the zany humor, "English" brings the comic temperature down a bit further.

Jay has always been the ironic, unappreciated underdog of his school, department and life — a not very successful writer who painfully knows writing better than those who have outwritten him — and thus, he's archly sympathetic. Here we have more of the same, but perhaps more arch and less sympathetic because the students in his care, already straining credulity in a nonsatirical way, are also underdogs in their own strained, if amusing, way. We meet them through their applications to the program and through the papers they grudgingly and "very uniquely" (as one is warned against saying) produce during their English experiences.

Brent, who quickly and unsuccessfully tries to un-apply, thinks he'll follow the example of Charles Dickens ("He was a writer," he informs Jay). Wyatt thought he was applying to go to the Caymans and packed accordingly. Felicity composes a poem about her cat. Xanna is suffering from a mysterious illness. Lin is only there because her major "requires study abroad which has historically been about young white Americans losing their virginity and learning how to use a salad fork." Elwyn turns a visit to Westminster ("Westmonster") Abbey into a horror story featuring medieval women writers denied a place in Poets' Corner. Joe's claustrophobia, arising from a traumatic event that landed him in juvie, complicates his tour of the Churchill War Rooms, an underground museum.

There's the thing: claustrophobia, trauma, illness, lovesick dopiness, sad cat love. They're young people with problems and, however silly they're supposed to be, they're ultimately more pitiful than funny.

Here, Schumacher seems to be aiming more directly at the heart that always beats beneath a decent comedy but, as in the series' first two books, moves aside for laughs. So, for belly laughs, read the first book. For a rollicking good time, read the second. But for the sometimes meager, sometimes heart-piercing comedy of life's many letdowns, treat yourself to "The English Experience."

Ellen Akins is a Wisconsin-based writer and writing teacher.

The English Experience

By: Julie Schumacher.

Publisher: Doubleday, 240 pages, $27.

Event: Reading/signing, 6 p.m. Tue., Next Chapter Booksellers, St. Paul. Free.