Books: American Whoppers

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...