The first time I met Mordecai Richler was through his son Noah, a BBC producer with whom I’ve worked a couple of times. Richler fils had invited me over to the family home in Quebec’s Eastern Townships on the day after Christmas, when Richler père presides over a vast snooker tournament of family, friends, and locals. As things turned out, I could only manage the lowest score it’s possible to get on a snooker table. But then most of the other fellows present were the sort who’d been loafing around pool halls since they were eight: carpenters, plumbers, snowplow operators …

In Britain and the Commonwealth, December 26 is known as Boxing Day, so called because it was the day when people would give Christmas boxes of small gifts and gratuities to their servants, local tradesmen, the deserving poor of the parish, etc. Because of the date, I vaguely assumed that Richler was filling his home with blue- collar types and ruddy peasants as some exquisitely condescending act of seasonal seigniorial munificence. After all, one of the most tiresome aspects of literary London is the way writers like Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie—authors whose work is chiefly distinguished for its inability to understand the impulses which motivate the average man—affect a bogus, blokey solidarity with the masses, boring on about how much they love, say, soccer. We all know that Rushdie would last even less time among a terraceful of Millwall fans than at a mullahs’ convention in Teheran.

But, with Richler, it isn’t a pose. As I subsequently discovered, when he’s in the Townships, you can usually find him most afternoons around four at a tavern called the Owl’s Nest, perched at the bar, enjoying a couple of scotches and marveling over such signs of the times as Labatt’s pioneering lesbian beer ads in the company of the same cheerfully sexist, homophobic farmers and loggers, carpenters, plumbers, and snowplow operators who make up his Boxing Day party. This is the company he prefers to keep. In 1972, after twenty years away, he returned to Quebec because he suddenly realized the only people he knew in London were writers, editors, critics, and directors: total immersion in the world of letters was in danger of drowning his writing. The literary world, he says, is “dull: it’s a tradesman’s world.” So, even in Montreal, he hangs out with lawyers, bankers, and accountants. “They’re not as witty, but they’re more interesting. It’s a richer world.”

He’s right. And one reason for the pitiful retreat of the English novel—and the comic novel in particular—is that more writers don’t see it. If you’re holed up in a university or kicking around the media, you eventually run out of anything to write about. One assumes that’s the reason why so many novelists end up playing kiddie games with the laws of physics (writing novels that go backwards etc.): the alternative—going out into the world—is too ghastly to contemplate. Eventually, the comic horizons just shrivel away. Even Kingsley Amis by the end wasn’t doing much except shuttling between home and the Garrick Club—and, in his last novels, it showed: the only people he knew not of his type were the two Asian fellows who ran the local news agent’s (we were neighbors in London). In Richler’s comic universe, the ratio of writers to businessmen is about what it is in real life— and in the self-absorbed laager of the modern novel this alone would give him distinction even if he didn’t find it hard to take the whole concept of a “writer” seriously. As the young wordsmith in his short story “Some Grist for Mervyn’s Mill” (1969) puts it:  

“Nothing really matters. In terms of eternity our lives are shorter than a cigarette puff. Hey,” he said. “Hey!” He took out his pen with the built-in flashlight and wrote something in his notebook. “For a writer,” he said, “everything is grist to the mill. Nothing is humiliating.”

Barney’s Version is Richler’s first novel since Solomon Gursky Was Here, and in the eight years between he has mostly been busy winding up his fellow Quebeckers.[1] For his return to fiction, he’s found an eponymous hero who’s almost a precise inversion of Richler. They’re about the same age—the author is sixty-six, his protagonist three years older—and the contours of their lives are not dissimilar—Paris in the early Fifties, then back to Montreal via London and Hollywood. But, whereas Richler is a lone novelist in his circle of lawyers and plumbers, Barney Panofsky is a cheery philistine in a group of literary talents— make that “literary talents.” There’s his first wife, Clara, a delicate, if sexually promiscuous, waif to whom he’s briefly married in Paris. After her suicide, she finds fame through her posthumously published poems and drawings. The Virago’s Verse Book, now in its 28th printing, includes a poem dedicated to Barney:

he peeled my orange and more often me,
Calibanovitch,
my keeper.

There’s his best friend, Boogie, who, after an excerpt from his work-in-progress appears in the New American Review, acquires an indestructible reputation as the author of the greatest American novel yet to be written.

The longer he resisted cutting a deal with a publisher, the higher the figures flew. Finally Boogie signed with Random House for an advance that ran into six figures, not unusual today, but I’m talking 1958, the year the Canadiens won their third Stanley Cup in a row, taking out the Boston Bruins 5-3 in game five.

And then there’s Terry McIver, a giant of the Canadian literary landscape who has decided to publish his diaries, including his account of those far-off days in Paris, when that distinctive McIver style was still being formed:

P——— still tends to invert many of his sentences, as if they were translated from the Yiddish, as in, “He was a hateful bastard, Clara’s doctor,” or, after the fact, “Had I known it would have been different, my behavior.” I must remember to use this peculiar syntax when writing a Jew’s dialogue …

Wrote 600 words today and then tore them up. Inadequate. Mediocre. Like me?

Reluctant to be consigned to history as the “P———” of McIver’s memoirs, Barney Panofsky determines to set down his own version, “the true story of my wasted life.” Wasted? Well, he hasn’t written any lower-case poetry or novels-in-progress but he is the head of Totally Unnecessary Productions, which cranks out hugely lucrative schlock for Canadian television. His most reliable money-spinner is the popular Mountie adventure series, McIver of the RCMP >, named for his bête noir.

Whenever a government minister, a free-marketeer responding to American pressure, threatened to dump the law that insisted on (and bankrolled to a yummy degree) so much Canadian-manufactured pollution on our airwaves, I did a quick change in the hypocrite’s phone booth, slipping into my Captain Canada mode, and appeared before the committee. “We are defining Canada to Canadians,” I told them. “We are this country’s memory, its soul, its hypostasis, the last defence against our being overwhelmed by the egregious cultural imperialists to the south of us.”

On the other hand, it’s the “bonking scenes in canoes and igloos” which have made McIver such a hit in the UK and other lucrative markets.

Barney sees himself as a player piano— i.e., he has no music of his own. But, compared to his Plath-like first wife and Brodkeyesque pal, he’s a wonderful, rollicking storyteller, a truly creative force whose insights are sharper and more humane than any of the self-proclaimed artists to whom he’s content to play Man Friday. The author’s structure for these reminiscences is ostensibly unstructured—as disheveled as Barney and, come to that, Richler himself. But the disheveled surface belies a book that’s in fact highly (as P. G. Wodehouse would say) sheveled. Barney’s Version rambles back and forth across the decades, as if it were no more than a taped transcription of random thoughts. But it manages to encompass three wives—Clara; The Second Mrs. Panofsky (never named); and, last but best, Miriam—plus a lovingly uninhibited portrait of Montreal Jewry, snapshots of Hollywood, observations on Quebec separatism and tap-dancing, and general musings on the changing nature of women: “These days,” says Barney, “some of them also go in for soya-oil breast implants. You nibble a nipple and what do you get? Salad dressing.” You may recognize the style from Richler’s notebooks for The New Criterion— the accumulation of apparent inconsequentialities. But Barney’s Version also incorporates a murder mystery—Boogie disappears into a Laurentian lake, and Barney winds up in court—and the almost effortless way this most rigid of genres is folded into what appears to be the most shapeless of books is the surest sign of Richler’s technical mastery.

In the same way, the reader’s sense that everything in Barney’s life is about to swim into focus emerges even as Barney finds his own life swimming out of focus. Small things at first, like not being able to remember the name of that thing you strain spaghetti in, or more than four of the Seven Dwarfs. Just natural absentmindedness, nothing to make a fuss about? Or a telltale sign of something worse? By the time Barney comes to take the test for Alzheimer’s, it’s the eve of Quebec’s 1995 referendum on whether or not to leave Canada.

“What city are we in?” asks the doctor.

“Montréal …”

“And the country we’re in?”

What a ridiculous question to ask in Quebec. The answer you’d get certainly doesn’t depend on whether or not the guy you’re talking to has got Alzheimer’s. In this one scene, Richler’s eye for the absurd and his power to move, profoundly, come together with a peculiar intensity. “It suits me,” says Barney early on, “to be rooted in a city that, like me, is diminishing day by day.” Mordecai Richler’s Montreal is one of the most vivid of literary landscapes, and has been ever since The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The only problem is it’s now far more vivid than the city itself, which increasingly resembles something hit by a strangely selective neutron bomb. Among the vast Anglophone exodus are Richler’s own children, gone to richer employment opportunities in London and Toronto. It would seem statistically unlikely that what’s left of the English population could ever again produce a writer of Richler’s stature. In Barney’s Version, Barney’s predecessors in the Richler oeuvre—Duddy Kravitz, the Gurskys—are glimpsed at airports and in the background at parties like ghosts lingering for one last look. If it is Richler’s fate to be the first and last great Montreal (Anglo) novelist, then he has managed brilliantly in this book to conflate protagonist and place, so that Barney seems to be distilled from the same raucous mélange as the city itself, and his memories now seem as fragile as Canada’s once-confident Anglo-Celtic business capital. Je Me Souviens, say the license plates in Quebec. But who will remember for the Anglos? When Richler was a boy growing up on St. Urbain Street, he attended a school named for Viscount Byng, the soldier who commanded the Canadian Corps at Vimy Ridge during the Great War and subsequently became governor-general. Richler’s school is long gone, but he’s transferred Lord Byng’s name to the apartment building in which Barney resides. The Montreal of Richler’s youth now exists only in his novels.

It takes considerable adroitness to produce a wildly funny, satiric, virtuoso self-portrait of a man unaware that he’s trembling on the brink of the abyss. By the time Barney realizes the truth, and is briefly reunited with his beloved Miriam, Richler has unobtrusively shifted into a tenderness you don’t associate with him. He’s only a few years from his three-score-and-ten, but satiric novelists don’t usually age well. As they grow old, comics on the stage retreat into pandering, comics on the page retreat into crankiness: observation dwindles into obsession, drollness into biliousness. It’s happened with Kingsley Amis, Tom Sharpe and many others—a kind of comedic Alzheimer’s, in which the timing stumbles and trips and can’t get up again. Not with Richler. He can get at the idiocies of the modern world, but you don’t feel they’re eating him up. Thus, Barney goes off to Hollywood to pitch an idea to one of the town’s teenage moguls:

“But, lo and behold,” I went on to say, “the ship docks safely in New York, where the innocent kid is met by a sexy reporter, a Lauren Bacall type, who—

“Lauren Bacall,” he said. “You’ve got to be kidding, unless she’s playing somebody’s mother.”

Maybe that’s the gift bequeathed to him by his native province. In Canada, Richler is routinely described as “irascible,” but that’s only in Canadian terms, where the snow lasts six months but the suffocating blandness is year round. You couldn’t stick it out in Quebec if you weren’t a wag. On the night of that 1995 referendum, the premier, Jacques Parizeau, blamed the narrow defeat on what he called “ethnics”—i.e., non-Francophones—prompting Richler to set up the Prix Parizeau, a literary award for the best writing by Quebec ethnics, or les autres, as the separatists say. Gilles Rheaume, another more ferocious separatist, immediately reported Richler to the province’s Human Rights Commission, demanding that they prosecute him for racism. Eventually, the Commission sent him a long document explaining why they’d decided not to go ahead with the prosecution. He’s had it framed, so it can hang on the wall with the Governor-General’s Literary Award and his invitation to Buckingham Palace. What writer worth his salt wouldn’t thrive in such an environment? In Barney’s Version, someone quotes Hugh MacLennan on the perennial dilemma of the Canuck writer: “Boy meets girl in Winnipeg. Who cares?” But thanks to a weird combination of a stubborn writer and a demented environment, boy meets girl in Montreal: we care.

Notes
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Barney’s Version, by Mordecai Richler; Knopf, 355 pages, $25. Go back to the text.

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