Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...novel. The Last Chance, Jaffe updates those women, describing a year in the lives of four women verging on 40, all friends from the past; each of them faces the same dilemna of marriage versus career once again, and for the last time each attempts to discover what it is she wants and how that goal can be attained. The women who 20 years ago took a deep breath and gulped down bourbon have matured to white wine, but in their new sophistication they remain as drawn to New York's lure as ever, continually drifting deeper into its magnetic...
...might infer from these character outlines, The Last Chance is almost too delicious a novel to take seriously, to read any other way than curled up in bed late in the night, never looking away from the pages until the last savory morsel has been devoured. But toward the end of the meal, as depression threatens to dampen the reader's enthusiasm, the stark reality behind the lascivious, B-rated fluff emerges...
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...
...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...
...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...