Word: laddered
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...About avocados and hats and polities and screwing and everything else. The choices always are the same, yet we keep on making the same old decisions, somehow convincing ourselves that one day some incredibly right decision will take us a step closer to salvation, a rung higher on that ladder to heaven. And how do we keep at it? What do we call that force that pulls us on? Chutzpah...
...concludes Willie O'Toole, the Irish-Jewish poet narrator of Alan Lebowitz's novel. Climbing Willie's Ladder. Chutzpah, that untranslatable Yiddish expression referring to some brand of unique insolent bravery, is what propels us through that joke, life. And in Willie's case, it takes an awful lot of chutzpah...
...that there is anything wrong with the grotesque. Joseph Heller, Terry Souhern, and Philip Roth are great people to have around, but the kindness that runs through Willie's Ladder and a few other recent novels (such as John Cheever's Bullet Park ) make a nice alternative to a steady acidic diet...
...CLIMBING WILLIE'S LADDER. though, is a first novel and has its flaws. In the most introverted parts of the narrative (particularly at the beginning). Lebowitz edges towards the genre of the paranoid-Jewish-confessional novel, and he does not seem entirely comfortable with it. Willie's abject rantings and ravings about the dirt he exchanged with his ex-wives and lovers are laid on a bit too thick. It is only when Lebowitz brings Willie out of himself and into the world of a widow-friend of his late mother's and her tacky L.A. apartment or into...
...there is no room at the top for all the Joe Lamptons and Jimmy Porters, those angry young men from the working class, a black man in Britain can't even get his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. Two Gentlemen Sharing presents a tidy essay on John Bull and Jim Crow by telling the somewhat unlikely tale of a West Indian who desperately wants entry into the Establishment and a young ad man who is struggling...