Looking for Canterbury: Synopsis

Looking for Canterbury focuses on several Vietnam War veterans who suffer from post-traumatic-stress disorder and seek to heal themselves by telling non-Vietnam-related tales in idyllic Central Park. In flight from years of unrewarding support-group therapy, the seven vets don the costumes, eat the medieval food, and play the roles of Chaucer's storytellers (including the gregarious Host, sexy wife of Bath, unscrupulous Pardoner, and rowdy Miller) whose personalities they strikingly resemble. Their pilgrimage to an "American Canterbury" is conceived, funded, and set in motion by Harry Baylor, a Broadway butcher and "Chaucer nut" who will ultimately, by spiritual means, purge himself of his particular Nam torment. Inevitably, every tale told in Looking for Canterbury is overtaken by the Nam-connected demon that haunts the teller. Bonded in Nam and burned in Nam, the vets learn that their Canterbury may well lie in a visit to the War Memorial in Washington, DC, or in a return to Vietnam itself.

The book offers compelling insight into the emotional and physical agonies that Vietnam veterans—both men and women—endured not only during the war but after they came home. In Looking for Canterbury , their journey through Central Park underneath the blossoming cherry-trees and past the first robins of spring is for them—and us—just as it was for Chaucer's pilgrims, an experiencing of a spiritual rebirth.

For each of us, life is a quest. The Wife of Bath character is in search of a sixth husband—someone who will be good and kind to her. Harry Baylor the butcher, deflated by his marital woes, may well, indeed, as accused by one of his colleagues, have dreamed up and financed his "Chaucer Gala" as a means by which to "play God" and reconstruct his shattered ego. The "Miller's" quest-or vengeful need—is to kill the C.O. who sent him and his buddies into a reckless, disastrous attack on the enemy. The "Pardoner," a dishonest press officer in Nam, remains true to character in civilian life as a psychiatrist who exploits his patients. Our Quest may not always be a noble one, but it is what makes us Us.

Jason Marks on What Inspired Him to Write This Book:

JM: "First, the idea for a journey. Each of our lives is a journey shrouded in mystery. Haunted by the ghosts of our past, we press forward tantalized by our expectations of an unknown future. (Belvedere Castle overlooking Central Park has always symbolized for me that indefinable something we keep searching for—love? happiness? success? contentment?). Significantly, the image of the Castle appears at the top of the book cover of Looking for Canterbury .

"Second, the idea of Storytelling. The storytellers in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales -like the Nam-veteran tellers of tales in Looking for Canterbury — invariably, without their meaning to, project their own needs, emotions, and predilections onto their stories. The stories we narrate become inexorably x-ray pictures of our inner selves.

"And finally, the hero of Looking for Canterbury, Harry Baylor the butcher, is modeled after a butcher who filleted the fish and carved the meat my wife and I used to buy from a Broadway butcher shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The real-life vendor was a Vietnam War veteran and the stories he told me about his horrific experiences in Nam and after Nam sparked my imagination to fuse together the themes of Chaucer, Central Park, and Nam."