Merely Players

Although McDonald jumps disconcertingly among the four main characters, this picaresque third novel in the Time series holds the reader's interest. Lissome Janet Twombly lures men like a Venus flytrap: her good looks disarm them; her teasing remoteness draws them in. Promised to the virginal clergyman Dan Prescott, she falls in love with jazz pianist and composer David MacFarlane. He stirs Janet's restlessness, she his bourgeois longing for a wife and family. Living with David, drinking uncontrollably, traveling the world, Janet eventually marries him in a wild, sodden, midnight ceremony at the Club Solo, where David is the pack-'em-in pianist. Despite an abrupt and unsatisfying denouement, the cast of appealing if sometimes enigmatic characters and the highly evocative portrayal of the jazz world produce an absorbing narrative. (October)