Mordecai Richler died on July 3, and within minutes of the announcement there was a stampede from the grand panjandrums of “CanLit” to conscript him posthumously into the ranks of “Canadian novelists.” Mordecai was a novelist who happened to be Canadian, which isn’t quite the same thing, and he spent much of his life making gleeful digs about all the great writers who were, as he put it, “world famous in Canada.” Richler, by contrast, was world famous in, among other places, Italy, where his last novel, Barney’s Version, is a bestseller in its seventh printing and hugely popular among a population not known as great novel-readers. The word “Richleriano” has become the accepted shorthand for “politically incorrect.”

Richler was certainly Richleriano. In Solomon Gursky Was Here, there’s a scene set in the early Seventies in which one middle-aged character, forced to play host ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase