Montreal’s famous Gayety Theatre and the golden age of burlesque come alive in William Weintraub’s novel Crazy About Lili. In this, his fifth book, Weintraub draws upon a youth spent in Montreal and his education at McGill University.

Seventeen-year-old Richard Lippman of Westmount graduates from high school and enrols at McGill in the late 1940s. Richard is keen to do two things: find a direction in life and lose his virginity. Introduced to exotic dancer Lili L’Amour by his uncle, Richard is immediately smitten. He writes Lili a love poem. Lili promptly engages Richard to class up her act with his narrative poetry and follows his advice on choreographing her performance. Richard has competition for Lili’s affections in Sir Charles Hammond, president of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.

Lili introduces Richard to an untalented young stripper and Richard revitalizes her act, turning her into Freckles, an even younger stripper who nightly struggles to overcome her painful shyness by disrobing before an audience. However, all is not lighthearted fun. Lili flees Montreal just ahead of a hypocritical campaign by the Catholic Church to safeguard public morality. Richard is shocked by the appalling slums of Montreal’s east end and dabbles in McGill’s budding communist movement.

Weintraub does an excellent job of evoking period Montreal, with Richard dining at the Ritz, the Honey Dew, and Gagnon’s for ice cream sundaes. Richard samples the future of travel by making a day trip by air to Long Island to visit the wonders of Levittown. Sir Charles epitomizes the past, travelling by private rail car to New York and by steamship to England, where he stays at the country houses of the aristocracy.

Told with humour and style, Crazy About Lili is a trip down memory lane for those who came of age in postwar Montreal and an entertaining read for those who did not.