1.      Looking for Canterbury focuses on several Vietnam War veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and seek to heal themselves by telling tales in idyllic Central Park.  What recent catastrophic event in American history resonates their agony?  What emotional symptoms do the survivors of these two cataclysms share in common?

2.   This book is a historical novel based to a large extent upon the real-life experiences of men and women who served in the U.S. military during the war in Nam.  To what extent does his fictionalizing of what happened to them enhance our understanding of Looking for Canterbury?

3.   The novel dwells upon the lasting impact on our national consciousness of the Vietnam conflict;--the one war from which America failed to emerge victorious, it continues to nag at our psyche.  Was America right to engage in that war? Did our rationale for fighting it justify the sacrifice of more than 58,000 American lives in the dead and missing?  Are the characters in Looking for Canterbury uniformly persuaded they participated in a just war?

4.   What motivates Harry Baylor, Broadway butcher and Chaucer zealot, and his fellow Vietnam War survivors to undertake their journey through Central Park playing the roles of characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Do you believe we are the stories we tell and that the tales we narrate afford x-ray pictures of our inner selves? Can you give examples from your own experience?

5.   In flight from years of unrewarding support-group therapy, the seven vets--at Harry’s expense--don the costumes, eat the medieval food, and play the roles of Chaucer’s characters (including the gregarious Host, sexy wife of Bath, unscrupulous Pardoner, and  rowdy Miller) whose personalities they strikingly resemble.  Harry designs their odyssey through the Park as a means by which both to entertain them and to banish their profound depression.  Would you agree with him the truth about ourselves is sometimes best arrived at by indirection?

6.   Bonded by Nam and burned by Nam, Harry Baylor and his compatriots continue to live scarred mentally and emotionally by the devastating Nam-connected experiences they suffered.  What torment, in particular, haunts each of them? How nobly, or ignobly, does each confront his or her private ordeal?  Have you ever, in your own life, failed in your own estimation to “measure up” to a crucial emotional crisis?  If so, how finally were you able to cope with it or make amends? 

7.   Psychologists maintain that if we are able to control our emotions during a violently stressful event, we are less likely to undergo in the aftermath the painful recurring symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.  Was Harry Baylor able to master the horrifying emergency that confronted him while under attack in battle?  What circumstances militated against his emerging unscarred in mind and heart?

8.   For each of us, life is a quest.  Like the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales, Monica Hazeltine is in search of a sixth husband.  What happens between her and Harry Baylor that enables him to fulfill her need?  What destructive emotion propels the “Miller’s” quest?  What, collectively, do Harry and his compatriots seek in their journey through Central Park when the first robins of spring appear and the cherry trees burst into blossom?

9.   Inevitably, almost every tale told in Looking for Canterbury breaks down and is overtaken by the Nam demon that haunts the teller.  Where, then, does Canterbury lie for Harry and his anguished comrades? Can there, the book speculates, be any closure for them--given what they have endured?  How, possibly, can we who have not undergone what they have undergone identify emotionally with them and with those in real life who continue to suffer from the impact of the Vietnam War and World Trade Center calamity?

10. Does ritual have the power to heal, redeem, and console?  How does the journey through Central Park become a beneficial ceremony?  In what other rite--sacred to many Vietnam war vets--does Harry Baylor participate? What third manner of ritual--accessible to mankind since the beginning of recorded time--does he ultimately turn?

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