Word: old
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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EVERY DAY we have these decisions to make. 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...
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 heart goes out to these people. He laughs with them, not at them. When he visits old chum Orville Sandweiss, now locked into a wife-swapping element of Cleveland society. Willie does not mock bourgeois Orville. He merely describes and wonders how Orville goes on making love to his wife ("I might just as well be sticking it in soapy water," says Orville), Willie finds Orville outlandish and so do we-but it is an outlandishness on the side of the humane rather than the grotesque...
Another problem that bothered me a bit was the stylization of the dialogue: after a while, too many of the characters begin to sound exactly like Willie. The most glaring example is when Willie finds rapport with an ex-wife's nine-year-old daughter-and the basis of this rapport is as much the identical speech patterns Willie and the girl use as anything else...
...UNITED NATIONS, NY-"Little Shirley" would now like to be just good old Mrs. Black. the newest member of the United States delegation to the United Nations said yesterday...