NOW PLAYING AT CANTERBURY

by Vance Bourjaily ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 1976

Big in length and ambition, Now Playing at Canterbury uses Chaucerian multiple tales to bring to life a group of people putting on a new American opera at a midwest university. Working on the production are professors (the librettist, composer, designer), graduate music students (many of the singers), and a few outside professionals--the director and most of the leads. Preparations are repeatedly interrupted as one by one they tell stories out of their own pasts--tales ranging from realism to folk comedy to gothic horror to 18th-century verse. (One of them plays with comic-strip balloons.) All through Bourjaily reveals an exact ear for American speech; he has mastered the flow of the beer bust and dormitory bull session. A story told by a student singer catches the gritty fervor of the campus protests against the Vietnam War. Another fine stretch, both harrowing and funny, concerns an orgy orchestrated by a patron of the opera and enlisting some of the cast; reporting is a wry young Texas doctor who knows all the correct medical terms. Not every sub-story comes off, but enough do to build a great affection for Bourjaily's non-stock characters. Clearly, the ivory tower has long since toppled and Main Street has breached the university gates. It remains to be seen whether the excellences of this book will end the notion that Bourjaily is an ""almost""--a writer who has failed to deliver on the promissory note of his first, post-WW II novel, The End of My Life. canterbury's merits so far outweigh such deficiencies as a too-pat, sentimental ending that he has a good chance this time of squaring away that I.O.U.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dial

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: FICTION