Contemporary Literary Criticism | Richler, Mordecai (Vol. 185) - Thomas R. Edwards (review date 5 March 1998)

Thomas R. Edwards (review date 5 March 1998)

SOURCE: Edwards, Thomas R. “Pulling Down the Temple.” New York Review of Books 45, no. 4 (5 March 1998): 40-1.

[In the following review, Edwards explores the role of memory and truth in Barney's Version.]

“I dislike most people I have ever met,” says the leading character of the latest of Mordecai Richler's tales about smart, ambitious Jewish-Canadian men at war with their culture. Barney's Version is wildly comic, but as with most good satire those who make fun of others also mock themselves. Richler's anti-heroes suffer from a kind of Samson complex, as if compelled to pull down the temple even though they are inside it at the time. Barney's Version. Richler's tenth novel, is as usual almost universally offensive—to both French-and Anglo-Canadians, assimilated Jews, feminists, black activists, liberals, right-wingers, the ignorant young and their querulous elders,...

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