Aprille Fools

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE PARDONER'S TALE

by John Wain

Viking; 314 pages; $10.95

The Pardoner of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is that ecclesiastic scamp who sells indulgences and moonlights pig bones and rags as holy relics. Giles Hermitage, 50, the self-revealing hero of John Wain's new novel, also traffics in illusions. He is a writer whose books, like those of Wain himself, "were civilized and responsible, neither condescending to nor affronting the reader, and commanded a small but not fickle public."

One fan is Helen Chichester-Redfern, a terminal cancer patient who lives in the same English cathedral town as Hermitage. A deathbed friendship is struck, along with a sizzling affair with Mrs. C.-R.'s daughter Dinah, a churchgoing guitarist and bedroom athlete with the sexual etiquette of a praying mantis.

Dinah, a woman of parts, manages with fearsome practicality: "I know my needs are going to drive me into relationships with men and I know those relationships won't always be controllable. But in the overall plan of my life I budget for that." As a novelist, Hermitage is intrigued by her economics of the heart. As a man, he is smitten with a case of middle-age rut: He settles into a daily routine: a soul-searching chat with the dying mother, a brisk workout in bed with the daughter, and then back to the writing table and the new Hermitage novel.

In it, a vacationing middle-aged businessman named Gus Howkins falls in love with Julia, a distressed young actress fleeing from her famous actor husband. There are more than emotional and thematic parallels between Giles and Dinah and Gus and Julia. Their stories literally leap-frog each other in alternating chapters throughout The Pardoner's Tale.

Fiction within fiction is an old form, predating Chaucer, Boccaccio and perhaps even Scheherazade, who provided the first law of storytelling: enchant or perish. Author Wain seems familiar with the rewards and risks of laminating two tales. Wain may not achieve the iridescences of Vladimir Nabokov, modern master of the technique, but he moves from one story to the other without draining color from either. One reason is Giles' ability to regard himself as a character. His comments when both he and his fictional doppelgaenger love and lose: "He had been able to contemplate the story of Gus Howkins ... precisely because that story had been his companion through all the recent events in his life. It had gone along with him, step by step, providing an alternative existence that had strangely held to the same contours as his actual one. It had been a life-saving overspill."

The notion of art as roof gutter is nicely suited to Wain's thoughtful treatment of two middle-aged men joyfully making fools of themselves over younger women. In less knowing hands, The Pardoner's Tale might have been only a clever sex reversal on the stock English romance about a maiden schoolteacher's brief tryst in Italy. But instead of sentimentality, Wain offers genuine sentiments. Instead of passion enveloping quivering loins in petals of fire, there is a steady sensuous glow that warms the brain.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

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