It is easy, and not entirely unjust, to dismiss Neil Simon (b. 1927) as a purveyor of bourgeois triviality. His characters, like his audiences, have been for the most part unmistakably bourgeois—a fact that clearly does not bother him as much as some people think it ought to. Most of his work is devoted to the comic exaggeration of familiar foibles—not a matter of much interest to serious critics, except when provided by writers long since dead. When Simon himself tries to be overtly serious, his work is often vitiated by glibness, sentimentality, and unearned optimism. But along with the wisecracks and the happy endings is some authentic reality: personal, Jewish, American, even universal.