Reading Guide
From Crazy About Lili
Crazy About Lili by William Weintraub
Novel should appeal to those who remember pre-war Canada, Montreal specifically, as well as a new generation of readers, those who enjoy an accomplished and entertaining read that takes them to another time and place. For readers of The Catcher in the Rye and The…
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1. On its surface, Crazy About Lili is a look back at the misadventures of Richard Lippman, a nice middle-class Jewish boy from Westmount in his freshman year at McGill. The action centres on “two solitudes” of quite a different kind than Hugh MacLennan imagined when he thought about Montreal. Richard’s small world is divided between McGill and the Gayety, Montreal’s pre-eminent burlesque house, whose headline-making attraction, Lili L’Amour, the star striptease artiste, is the first real, live girl to take an interest in him. Although the book is set just after the Second World War, what lifts its characters and situations and ultimately the novel itself above simply being a light-hearted pratfall into the sleazier side of memory lane? Discuss the more serious purpose that the author might be pointing to in the opening paragraph, when he contrasts the extravagant ice cream confections Richard and his pals indulge in as “the mood in the booth was heavy with the misery of being seventeen years old in 1948.”
2. Readers of William Weintraub’s informal non-fiction portrait of Montreal, City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and ’50s, will immediately recognize some of the gamblers and grifters, reformers and rogues, industrialists and innocents abroad in Crazy About Lili even if made-up names lightly mask real identities. What are some examples of Weintraub’s journalistic eye for character and place at work? In what ways does the city itself become a major character in the novel? Do the colourful characters Richard encounters in the city enhance our sense of him as a person or do they overwhelm it?
3. William Weintraub has said in interviews that Crazy About Lili rounds out the picture of Lili St-Cyr he first sketched out in City Unique by expanding on her erotic power. His interest was piqued not only by the response of readers to that section of his earlier book but also by burlesque's recent revival in Montreal and elsewhere. “What the performers today detected in burlesque is the element of comedy," he has said. "They're learning that burlesque is allied to comedy and irony. Take Gypsy Rose Lee. She'd sing songs about Cézanne and Oscar Wilde. It was always tongue-in-cheek. There was a charm to it. What's making [burlesque] come back is the realization that the charm is gone.” Does Weintraub succeed in reviving the charm of the striptease artistes or does he present too rose-coloured a view of the past?
4. On his father’s side, Richard’s family has been in Montreal since 1804, but his mother, Sheila (nee Shaindel Mintz), is the daughter of Romanian immigrants and her brother Morty is “an unreconstructed son of St. Dominique Street, with no cultural affectations of any kind.” It’s Uncle Morty’s firm belief that his nephew isn’t being brought up the way a Jewish boy ought to be raised: “Just because your father has a lot of money, and you live in a big house in Westmount, your mother wants to look like a goy, sound like a goy, eat like a goy.” In what ways do the Lippmans and Mintzes reflect tensions specific to other similarly “mixed” families as portrayed in Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, and Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (to name only three of the many North American Jewish coming-of-age novels)? In what ways does Richard’s struggle to come to terms with both sides of his heritage reflect the deeper and more widespread twentieth-century existential conflict between doing something with your life and living freely?
5. Taking Richard in hand, Uncle Morty introduces him to “the remarkable, the unequalled, the unsurpassed interpreter of the terpsichorean art, Montreal’s sweetheart . . . the one and only Miss Lili L’Amour.” Lili doesn’t see herself as club owners and their patrons see her. “I’m not a stripper, I’m an artist and I don’t want anybody to forget that,” she tells Richard. Is there any real substance to her claim to kinship with the artistry of the dancer Isadora Duncan or is Lili merely deluding herself?
6. When Lili goes to England, she finds work at the notorious Windmill Theatre that is the subject of the recent film Mrs. Henderson Presents, a movie that echoes George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession, in which Shaw confronts the hypocrisy of the British upper class and its collusion in the vices of the workingman. Shaw makes each of his male characters representative of a type — the artist, the feckless young man, the unscrupulous capitalist, and the hypocritical vicar. In Shaw’s hands, all of them are caricatures and all of them are nasty. Weintraub takes Shaw’s cast and expands it. What other types of men does Weintraub present? Are they all caricatures? Are they inherently nasty or simply immature? Discuss the ways in which Richard differs from the other male characters in the book.
7. Like Shaw’s women, Weintraub’s female characters are more complex than his men. In what ways do his female characters’ contradictions make them both victims and exploiters, kind-hearted and manipulative, embarrassingly vulgar and alluringly sensual? Did you feel their various internal conflicts were closely and realistically observed or merely caricatured?
8. As a would-be poet, Richard seems more attuned to women than to men — or is he? Discuss the ways in which the artistic, political, and sexual longings of Lili, Sophia, and Joyce manipulate Richard’s life. In what ways do they enrich it?
9. Both Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game eviscerate roughly the same period and the same types of people portrayed in Crazy About Lili. All three offer accounts of obsessive adolescent behaviour and its out-of-kilter-with-the-rest-of-the-world consequences. All three are simultaneously funny and poignant but in different ways. As a hustler among hustlers at the Archer Agency, in what ways does Richard’s behaviour differ from Duddy’s in similar circumstances? What characteristics do Richard’s attempts at poetry share with Lawrence’s in Cohen’s first novel?
10. In Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen’s poem “The Party Was Over Then Too” begins, “When I was about fifteen/I followed a beautiful girl/into the Communist Party of Canada” and then describes experiences very similar to Richard’s when he follows Sophia to the same place. Cohen then notes, “I admired the Communists/for their pig-headed devotion/to something absolutely wrong.” Discuss Weintraub’s attitude to the Communists and compare it to Cohen’s. What does writing “choreography” for Lili and Joyce and “political poetry” for Sophia in the name of love teach Richard about love and money? What does writing Archer’s promotional copy for money teach Richard about money and love?
11. Although much in Montreal and the rest of the world has altered beyond recognition over the past half century, what has changed and what remains the same for young people who are suddenly presented with limitless opportunities for new intellectual, emotional, and sexual experiences?
12. At the end of the novel, Richard ponders the question of what kind of career he might follow. “[W]hat — besides public relations — might be open to a fellow whose main talent was for falsehood and deception. Of course it could be politics, or business, but Richard shuddered at the thought of those grubby occupations.” What does this say about what he has learned about himself and what he has learned about the world around him at the start of his second year of university? Where do you think his gifts will lead him?
13. Readers of Getting Started — William Weintraub’s evocative and poignant memoir of an early period in his lifelong friendships with Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Brian Moore — will know that unlike his three friends, Weintraub “didn’t aspire, at all costs, to literary heights.” Discuss the merits of his easier-going approach to erotic and romantic relationships. Compare his approach to that found in the novels of his friends.
14. In Montreal in 1948, Leonard Cohen had just entered high school, Mavis Gallant was writing feature articles for the Standard, Irving Layton was a schoolteacher and publishing his own poetry in chapbooks, Brian Moore had just arrived from Belfast and was editing copy at The Gazette, Mordecai Richler was a part-time reporter for the Herald and a full-time first-year university student at Sir George Williams College, and William Weintraub, who had recently graduated from McGill University, began writing for The Gazette. Although none of these authors makes a direct appearance in Crazy About Lili, in what ways can it be argued that the work of these writers have influenced the make-up of Richard Lippman and his world?
William Weintraub was raised in Montreal and educated at McGill before becoming a journalist and later a filmmaker for the NFB. He is the author of two previous novels, Why Rock the Boat? and The Underdogs, and two non-fiction books, City Unique and Getting Started.