Word: ladders
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Collier's wasn't, particularly. The company desperately needs attractive, stylish, very aggressive kids, but luckily there is a never-ending stream of them climbing the ladder of success who need money and are willing to do almost anything...
...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...
...these quarrels with Climbing Willie's Ladder are fairly minor and best ignored. Alan Lebowitz has had the chutzpah to write a nice book about a not-so-nice world. And these days that takes not only chutzpah but some extraordinary compassion as well...