Word: lebowitz
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Forty years old, four times married, author of two slim volumes of poetry, creative writing teacher at a provincial college-Willie O'Toole has endured a lot. But until you read through Lebowitz's description of it all, you can't possibly appreciate how much. Lebowitz has Willie lead us through his odyssey of hapless existence, a trip that takes us through the nitty-gritty of all four marriages (in the past), at least three affairs (in the present), and a large part of the American terrain (past and present). It could be pretty grim going, but thanks to Willie...
Willie's hope makes much of the American phenomena (swimming pool culture, perversions of academia, postmarital sex life) dissected in the novel seem not so much horrifying as pathetically funny. In taking this approach to life in American society. Lebowitz has come up with something different and genuinely beautiful as sick sixties fiction goes...
...Lebowitz has to be more specific. cut out a territory for himself somewhere between that of the dark humorist and the satirist. Willie's America is neither absurd nor gross. It is instead a wilderness, populated by fleshy people who act out vacuous models of existence that they are helpless to change...
...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...