Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THEM, by Joyce Carol Gates. The battle to escape the economic and spiritual depression of urban American life is the theme of this family-chronicle novel by the author of A Garden of Earthly Delights and Expensive People...
...most heavily industrialized state, which has started no fewer than 55 of them in less than a year. The commissions in several coastal towns are acting to protect the state's water basins, shoreline and lands below the high-tide mark. The town of Harding is considering a novel "stream-protection zoning" statute that would thwart pollution and overdevelopment along its many small streams. In short, the commissions are uniting local officials and environmentalists for action where it counts-at the grassroots level where decisions are made...
...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...
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...
...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...