NONFICTION - May 9, 1993

CHAUTAUQUA SUMMER by Rebecca Chace (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $21.95; 208 pp.). Rebecca Chace grew up the daughter of a journalist and a poet, a girl who was destined for Harvard and believed that oysters grew on iced plates. But somewhere along the line she developed an obsessive fear of the mundane, and redefined higher education in an oddly literal way: She became a trapeze artist and hooked up with this generation’s Chautauqua, a summer vaudeville tour of the Northwest led by The Flying Karamazov Brothers. Her memoir of a single summer season is full of anecdotes about charming characters who drive the circuit in marginal vehicles and have a propensity for making up stage names for everything, from the performers to the dogs to the dishes they serve at dinner. Chace becomes Francesca Deviante at the drop of a spotlight; the man whom she calls Dimitri Karamazov throughout is her now-husband, Paul Magid. Chace chronicles their love affair as well, as a decade-long flirtation finally culminates in a romance that throws some members of the troupe’s extended family off-balance. Her prose style is breezy and light--Chace flies through the air with the greatest of ease whether she’s on the trapeze or on paper--but sometimes she’s too quick, too glib. Her world is so rich, it’s hard not to wish for a more considered view of it.