Crazy About Lili.

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

For 17-year-old Richard Lippman, 1948 is a momentous year of changes, as noted Montreal humorist William Weintraub describes in his side-splitting, often irreverent, and sometimes politically incorrect novel, Crazy About Lili.

Set in Montreal with scenes in Westmount, on The Main, and at McGill University, the story details Lippman’s hilarious coming of age with his formal education at the university and a major summertime stop to learn the street smarts of Montreal’s bars, bistros, nightclubs, and strip joints. With a horny uncle of shady character as a mentor, Richard gets introduced to Lili L’Amour, the striptease queen of the day at the Gayety Theatre, and falls head over heels for her nearly naked charms. An aspiring poet, he begins writing Lili’s accompanying routines, sometimes plagiarized from the work of well-known poets.

One success leads to another, but while he can’t bed the elusive and older Lili, who moves on to bigger and better venues and ever richer patrons, Richard does lose his virginity to another of Lili’s referrals for whom he creates a whole new persona as “Freckles,” the shy but clothes-shedding “girl next door.” As he fantasizes over Lili’s letters from abroad while she travels the world, Richard gets involved with Communist reactionaries at McGill, toys with fleecing his maiden aunt out of her savings, and flirts with personal fame as the right hand flak for an unsavoury public relations hack. A gentleman to the end, he moons over “his holy relic, the pasty that once adorned Lili’s left breast,” but tells his friends about his summertime misadventures only, “Well, I made a few dollars. But it wasn’t anything interesting. Just a joe job in an office.” Could Duddy Kravitz have done any better?

A master of the comic understatement, Weintraub brings late 1940s Montreal to life with his references to the landmarks of the era. But the comedy and laughter that saturate page after page of Crazy About Lili to make it a must-read affair come directly from William Weintraub’s uniquely ingenious imagination.