American Whoppers

By Paul Gray

NOW PLAYING AT CANTERBURY

by VANCE BOURJAILY

518 pages. Dial. $10.

Like a number of his contemporaries--Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Irwin Shaw and John Home Burns--Vance Bourjaily salvaged a good first novel (The End of My Life) out of the rubble of World War II. Critics spotted him among this cadre of new novelists, who became part of the curriculum for an American literary renaissance. The smart writers paid no attention. Neither life nor art traipses after textbooks, and the Mailers and Vidals went their separate ways. But Bourjaily, now 54, has never escaped the stigma of premature recognition. On the appearance of each of his next five novels, he was cuffed for failing to live up to a promise that others had made for him.

Jolly Read. Small wonder then that Now Playing at Canterbury seems designed to stun the carpers into silence. The novel's considerable heft and the titular allusion to Chaucer are signs that High Seriousness is about to be committed. Bourjaily's publisher has pitched in with a prepublication hype apparently keyed to the Second Coming ("one of the most important books Dial will ever publish ... the major work by a major American novelist"). Such hoopla not only raises expectations that Moby-Dick would have trouble satisfying, but it also obscures the nicest thing about Bourjaily's novel. It is not the obligatory cultural headstone for this year: it is a generally jolly read.

The Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales appears only in the author's purloined formula: toss some interesting strangers together and stir. The plot is launched by English Professor Rigby Short, whose opera libretto, $4000, is about to be performed at a large Midwestern university. The locale resembles the University of Iowa, where Bourjaily has been associated with the writers' workshop for the past 16 years. (In 1969 an opera for which he wrote the libretto, $4000, was staged there.) The novel's cast is composed of a gaggle of graduate students, some local singers and several professionals from the outside. An esteemed Japanese conductor appears on the scene, along with a wisecracking director from Philadelphia. What happens, Short is asked, when such a diverse group comes together? His answer: "They tell lies."

So they do, splendidly. There is the yarn about the innocent temptress from Biloxi, Miss., and the odd revenge she takes on the man who steals her away. That one is topped by the tale of the fastest Jeep in the world and a deadly race in the Mexican foothills. A graduate student contributes a chiller about a pack of man-eating cats in his home town.

When they are not swapping whoppers and case histories, the members of the troupe couple and uncouple in scenes that manage to be both erotic and clinically detached. Jealousies arise; a small epidemic of paranoia breaks out as opening night approaches. Linking all this motion and emotion is the production itself--the constant grind of rehearsals, the inexorable piling up of bits and pieces into something with the potential for magic.

Pleasant Dreams. Bourjaily recounts these nervous preparations with the expertise of one who has been through them. Unfortunately, he also includes the whole libretto of $4000. Since he wrote it, his fondness for the piece is forgivable. But his tearjerker about a Southern construction crew does not sing on the page. Bourjaily lovingly describes the eventual performance as a smash success; yet it is impossible to imagine how a "solid, bass boom" of a voice could save the line: "I'll see you in the morning, Buster. Pleasant dreams."

In addition, Bourjaily does not always sense when his powers of invention are flagging. Some of the interpolated tales are simply dull. Others are tricked out with bad mannerisms. One limps along in rhymed couplets. Another makes extensive--and pointless--use of comic-strip balloons filled with dialogue. A young black performer talks and thinks in a free-associating patois lifted and badly fumbled from Finnegans Wake.

Fortunately, Bourjaily has chosen a framework loose and capacious enough to absorb the bad with the good. And his virtues have never been on better display. He can capture American speech and cage it on the page without loss of vitality. His sympathies are generous; his descriptions of the nation's heartland landscapes throb with passion. Because its parts are greater than the sum of its whole, Now Playing at Canterbury will disappoint those who are still searching for that Loch Ness monster of the literary swim, the Great American Novel.

No matter. It should be accepted gratefully for what it is: a minor piece, flawed but undeniably alive.

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