If you don't know Chaucer's Wife of Bath and her contribution to The Canterbury Tales, you might like this better than I did. Smith has taken the Wife's Prologue and Tale, kept them in rhyming couplets, and updated them to Brent, a modern-day suburb of London that is home to many immigrants. Alvita, the five-times married "wife" of Smith's version, speaks with a Caribbean dialect, as do most of the characters. She sets the story in a bar, customers replacing the original pilgrims, and adds a Chorus to the performance, as well as stage directions. This is supposedly part of a celebration of Brent receiving an honor as a neighborhood.

All that is fine, but unfortunately, it got very tedious very quickly for me. I studied the Tales in school myself and taught it many, many times as an English professor. I expected I would be delighted to recognize the changes Zadie Smith would make in her update, but I found there wasn't really much to the update beyond the setting and dialect. I think readers of the original usually get the point that the Wife is a feminist of sorts, and in this update, that seems not so much surprising as repetitive. ( )

I didn't study Chaucer or The Wife of Bath in college but I know a bit about it from friends who were English majors. The idea of updating the story to be about a modern London woman of Jamaican descent is hilarious and I would love to see it perfomed. If you are at all attuned to the dynamics of this story - from the direction of Chaucer, theatre or London, you will enjoy this script. Luckily Chaucer's original text is included in the publication for reference.

The book is worth reading just for Zadie Smith's intro. ( )