Mordecai Richler

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Mordecai Richler Long Fiction Analysis

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In an article titled “Why I Write,” Mordecai Richler repeats the honest answer given by George Orwell to the same question: sheer egotism, aesthetic enthusiasm, political purposes, and historical impulse. These reasons, modified by Richler’s unique perception, are clues to the form and content of his work.

Richler’s egotistical desire to be talked about was, no doubt, fulfilled, as he was the victim of attacks from both Jews and Protestants for what they considered to be unjust satiric portraits of their respective communities. He even said that to be a Jew and a Canadian is to emerge from the ghetto twice, as a sense of self-consciousness and envy pervades both societies. His satire, however, even when confined by the geography of Montreal, is more universal than some critics have assumed, and this element has enhanced his status as a significant writer. Although Richler never wanted to acquire the role of writer as personality (avoiding the talk-show circuit as much as possible and loathing being cast as the kind of figure Norman Mailer became), his fierce attacks on provincialism, pretension, community arrogance, envy, and class economic superiority marked him as a highly visible, eccentric, and often vicious outsider.

While there is a great deal of harshness in Richler’s writing, it is not merely personal vindictiveness; rather, it is anarrative strategy of accurate observation informed by imagination. It is a grotesque comic style designed to emphasize the absurdity of the human condition and to mock those whose misdirected values merely cause suffering. In The Acrobats, Richler dissects a generation of hollow men who infest the corrupt world of Spain’s festival time, in which a loss of belief is symbolized by fallas, empty wood and papier-mâché dolls. It is a nightmare world of confusion and fantasy that culminates in the death of antihero André Bennett. Without capturing the flavor and intensity of Ernest Hemingway’s lost generation, Richler, in a limited way, sets the themes for his later novels by attacking all attitudes that he thinks are essentially destructive.

Richler admitted to a certain sense of guilt prompted by the discrepancy between his life at home facing a blank page and the memory of his father going to work in his junkyard in subzero weather. Perhaps this recognition of the severity of ordinary life gave him the focus of his work, the precisely observed but critically and ironically rendered life of the common man fighting circumstances greater than himself.

Richler’s intelligence, however, did not allow him to glorify hisprotagonists uncritically. The tension between what is and what ought to be is always present in Richler’s fiction; the result is a controlled realism balanced by a satiric distance that allows fantasy, nightmare, and a morally grounded sense of the ridiculous. As George Woodcock observed, Richler was influenced by the realism of André Malraux, Albert Camus, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but Richler himself praised Evelyn Waugh as the greatest novelist of his time, and there is in Richler’s work much of the energy, sensibility, and bawdiness of American writers such as Philip Roth.

When Richler spoke of a political purpose, he followed Orwell’s idea that a novelist should push the world in a certain direction, that in fact any serious novelist is therefore a moralist. Although many of his stories end tragically, there is still a sense that his characters exist not as victims of a cruel, impersonal fate but as victims of their own and others’ actions. The choices they make are important ones and often lead to disaster when they are not based on a consistent moral viewpoint. Norman Price in A Choice...

(This entire section contains 4372 words.)

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of Enemies recognizes that choices are significant but no longer has the courage to make the difficult ones that confront his modern generation. He ends up complacently accepting values from his friends. In The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Richler succeeds in making Duddy a partially sympathetic character, often a victim of powerful people even more ruthless than he is, but Duddy, blinded by ambition, is the indirect cause of his friend Virgil’s paralysis from a motor accident. In his enthusiasm for the direct, specific attack, however, Richler takes a moral position that often seems diffuse or simply confusing. Two of his novels, St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now, manifest a more coherent intention that makes the satire even more meaningful.

Much of the force of Richler’s work comes from his observation and memory of life in the Montreal ghetto of his youth. Even novels such as Cocksure and The Acrobats are distilled through the experience of the expatriate Canadian trying to make sense of a less provincial foreign world. Richler said that he felt rooted in Montreal’s St. Urbain Street, and, because that was his time and place, he elected to get it right. To that end, Richler’s fiction often concerns the same characters from Fletcher’s Field High School as they experience life at different stages of intellectual and emotional growth. A peripheral character such as Jake Hersh, for example, in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and The Street, becomes the focus of St. Urbain’s Horseman.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

There is so much comic energy in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz that the reader can easily underestimate the social and moral implications of the work. Richler stated that to a certain extent the reader should sympathize with Duddy, who must rise above the poverty of the St. Urbain ghetto to challenge and defeat powerful manipulators such as Jerry Dingleman, the Boy Wonder. The ambiguity of Duddy’s character creates a problem of moral focus, however, in that some of his victories are at the expense of truly kindhearted people, such as Virgil Roseboro and Yvette.

There are certainly many reasons for Duddy’s aggressive, almost amoral behavior. His mother died when Duddy was very young, leaving him without the female stability he needed at the time. His father, Max the Hack, who drives a Montreal cab and pimps on the side, lets Duddy fend for himself, as most of his affection and attention goes to his elder son, Lenny. Duddy remembers that his father wrote many letters to Lenny when he worked at a resort, but Max refuses to write to Duddy. Max also encourages Lenny to go to medical school and is proud of his achievements; he makes it obvious that he expects little from Duddy and does not perceive the extent of Duddy’s ambition or his loyalty to his family. Duddy is also often humiliated by the affluent university students with whom he works as a waiter at the Hotel Lac des Sables. Irwin Shubert, for instance, considers Duddy a social inferior and, using a rigged roulette wheel, cheats him out of three hundred dollars.

Although Richler elicits sympathy for Duddy by explaining his situation, he undercuts a completely sympathetic attitude toward Duddy by detailing the results of the character’s actions. Duddy’s exploitation of the other students of Fletcher’s Field High School leads even his friend Jake Hersh to believe that Duddy makes everything dirty. Duddy’s schemes to make money are clever enough; he works out a system to steal hockey sticks from the Montreal Canadiens, but he does not realize that the blame rests on the stick boy, who is trying to earn money through honest, hard work. More seriously, Duddy, through a cruel practical joke, is responsible for the death of Mrs. Macpherson, the wife of one of his teachers. Later, as he tries to make his dream of owning land come true, Duddy rejects his lover, Yvette, causes the paralysis of his friend Virgil, from whom he also steals money, and alienates his grandfather, Simcha, who cares for him more than anyone else.

Duddy’s relationship with Simcha provides both the moral tone and the narrative drive of the novel. Simcha, a man trusted but not loved by the elders of the St. Urbain ghetto for his quiet, patient integrity, is loved by his favorite, Duddy. Like many others of his generation, Simcha feels the weight of the immigrant’s fear of failure and instills in Duddy the idea that a man without land is a nobody. For Simcha, this cliché is a more complex concept associated with the traditional struggles of the Jews and presupposes a sense of responsibility. Duddy misinterprets the implications of his grandfather’s advice and perceives it as a practical imperative. He determines to gain land at any cost, involving himself in many schemes—from importing illegal pinball machines to filming Bar Mitzvahs with a bizarre, alcoholic documentary director—in order to purchase land for commercial development.

For a short time, Duddy’s plans misfire; he goes bankrupt and is unable to pay for the land he wants so badly. Upon hearing that the Boy Wonder, the ghetto “miracle” who has escaped his environment by drug peddling and other corrupt means, covets the same land, Duddy forges checks in Virgil’s name to get enough money to make the purchase. In a closing scene, Duddy brings his family to see his property. By coincidence, the Boy Wonder arrives, and Duddy drives him away with verbal abuse. His father is more impressed with this act of defiance than with Duddy’s achievement, and later, among his circle of friends, Max begins to create a legend about Duddy in much the same way he created the legend of the Boy Wonder. Although his victory has been effected through deceit and victimization, Duddy’s behavior seems vindicated; he smiles in triumph, unaware that he continues only under the spell of a shared illusion. The reader is left elated to a certain extent at the defeat of the Boy Wonder, yet sobered by the figure of Simcha crying in the car after Yvette has informed him of Duddy’s method of acquiring the land.

St. Urbain’s Horseman

Unlike Duddy Kravitz, whose life is defined by the wealth he acquires, Jake Hersh of St. Urbain’s Horseman is defined by the exploits of his cousin Joey, the “Horseman” of the title. In his quest for certainty and identity in a world of confusion and moral ambiguity, Jake chooses a dubious model of behavior that eventually becomes an obsession. Much of the comedy and much of the human drama in the book come from the discrepancy between Jake’s illusions of the Horseman and the reality of his own life.

In this work Richler experiments with a cinematic style of flashbacks and flash-forwards, not only to create a sense of suspense but also to show the role memory plays in developing a character. It is obvious that Jake is involved in some sort of sex scandal that threatens his married and professional life. As the trial progresses, the narrative is punctuated by the events in Jake’s life that have led him to this degradation. In his youth, he wanted to escape the St. Urbain ghetto and the provincial nature of Canada itself. Typically, however, he leaves Canada to escape boredom only to find it everywhere.

Although Jake’s loving relationship with his wife offers the promise of real stability, Jake seems to believe that only his cousin Joey leads a meaningful life, fighting injustice wherever he can find it. Specifically, he thinks Joey is the lone avenger riding after Josef Mengele, the feared Doktor of the Nazi extermination camps. At first, Joey is simply the black sheep of the Hersh family, leaving home at a young age and returning periodically to disrupt the mundane lives of his relatives. Jake, who is eleven years younger than Joey, perceives him to be a hero and dismisses the accusations that he is just a criminal taking advantage of others for his own gain. Uncle Abe even tells Jake that the famed Horseman is more likely to blackmail Mengele than kill him.

By the time Jake reaches adulthood, his fantasies and nightmares about his cousin assume mythic proportions, and he incorporates this mythology into his daily concerns, measuring himself against the Horseman he has created. Jake’s consequent search for Joey in Israel and Germany uncovers the grim reality of Joey’s fraud, drug smuggling, and disastrous love affairs, but Jake only rationalizes his negative impression; he places the Horseman’s quest for “justice” beyond the sphere of ordinary moral culpability or human responsibility.

Jake reasons that he is a product of his generation, conceived in the Great Depression. He and others like him lived through the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Holocaust, the Israeli War of Independence, McCarthyism, the Korean War, and finally the Vietnam War. They were always the wrong age to be involved; they were merely observers, moral bystanders who could protest and give advice, but who were fundamentally impotent. Jake wants answers to his plight but feels even more alienated from the important issues of his time because he is a case history of the Jewish intellectual born into the Canadian working class. He finds his generation and its concerns trivial and peripheral, easily susceptible, in his thinking, to the guilt induced by the “injustice collectors”—the prison camp survivors and the starvelings of Africa.

These issues, these betrayals of age, are contrasted with the more personal betrayals of life: Jake’s father rejects his marriage to a non-Jew; Luke Scott decides to choose a British director instead of Jake, his best friend, for his first major script; Jenny dismisses Jake as a lover because he is too young; and Harry Stein implicates Jake in the rape of a young woman. Jake is no more capable of understanding these events than he is capable of understanding historical events of more significant import.

After the trial, in which Jake is found guilty of indecent assault and fined, he receives word that the Horseman has been killed in a plane crash while smuggling cigarettes. He retreats to his attic and finds a gun hidden in the Horseman’s saddle. It fires only blanks, its efficacy as illusory as the Horseman’s exploits. Upon discovering this, Jake seems to return to reality, but later he dreams that he is the Horseman extracting gold fillings from Mengele’s teeth with pliers. He wakes up and changes the Horseman’s journal to read “presumed dead.” The irony is that Jake will probably continue to search for certitude and will live a tolerable life based on illusion; he does not realize that the love of his wife is the stable point that will exist despite the illusion.

Joshua Then and Now

There are many similarities between St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now: The time schemes of both works are not linear but rather shift backward and forward in a search for meaning that takes precedence over simple historical considerations; the characters are graduates of Fletcher’s Field High School who gain obvious material success but are not immune to even the minor ravages of time; the major issues of the world are always present, but private and personal issues dominate; and Joshua Shapiro, like Jake Hersh, tries to make sense of his own life in terms of facing the past. The important difference between the two novels is that Richler’s attitude toward life in Joshua Then and Now is much more humane, and love is seen as the moral imperative that makes all other attitudes seem trivial.

Joshua Then and Now begins close to the present with Joshua in a cottage retreat suffering from multiple fractures incurred in a car accident. Because of hints of a sex scandal, he is guarded from the press by his father, Reuben, and his father-in-law, Senator Stephen Hornby. Joshua reads many letters from his fans and colleagues who have scorned him for what they think is his atrocious behavior, but he is able to put this criticism into perspective. He believes this public display of disapproval is what he deserves for the roguish behavior of his youth. Reflecting on his life, he now is able to see clearly what was of real importance.

Joshua’s background seems almost surreal; certainly it is more colorful than the lives of his friends in St. Urbain. Joshua’s aspiration to be a sportswriter derived from his father, who was a Canadian boxing champion. After his retirement from the ring, Reuben became an enforcer for a gangster named Colucci. As a youngster, Joshua had to suffer both his father’s long absences and the resentment of the neighborhood over Reuben’s involvement with Colucci. Joshua’s mother, Esther, is an eccentric who bewilders him even more than his father. At Joshua’s Bar Mitzvah, Esther has too much to drink and decides to let the young boys see her perform as an exotic dancer. She shocks them with the explicitness of her movements and even lets them fondle her. Later in life, she gets involved in pornographic films and in running a massage parlor. It seems that Joshua’s independent and sometimes improbable behavior is the logical result of his upbringing.

In trying to prolong his adolescence, Joshua becomes as ridiculous as his parents, and although his exploits seem harmless, they do have consequences; Joshua’s fake letters about the novelist Iris Murdoch’s homosexuality, written to make money at the expense of the University of Texas, end up being made public, to Joshua’s disgrace. The pranks that he plays to gain revenge on his enemies—taking labels off Pinsky’s valuable wine bottles, defacing Jonathan Coles’s original painting, and planting illegal currency at Eli Seligson’s house—conclude with Joshua’s injuring himself in a high-speed car chase. For Joshua, at least, these episodes are a learning experience; they are stages on his way to maturity.

Joshua has many friends from his youth who still get together as the “Mackenzie King Memorial Society,” the name being an ironic comment on a prime minister whom they consider a fraud. As successful as they are, however, in their middle age they are susceptible to lawsuits, tax-evasion inquiries, bypass operations, hair transplants, and cancer. The struggle for material wealth and its attainment now seem inadequate as values. More important is Joshua’s involvement with the country-club circle. After marrying Pauline, Joshua is introduced to Jane and Jack Trimble and Pauline’s brother Kevin. Joshua marries above his social class, but he takes a resentful and superior attitude to his wife’s friends and relatives. He does as much as he can to sabotage a group that he believes has all the advantages. Through the years, however, he sees the disintegration of the Trimble marriage, the dashed hopes of the senator, and the death of Pauline’s dependent brother, which precipitates her madness, and realizes that, even with their pretensions, they were only trying to survive.

The echoes of the past are most vividly sounded when Joshua returns to Ibiza, Spain, to confront Mueller, a German, who had disgraced him more than twenty-five years before. To gain revenge on Mueller, Joshua leaves his wife at a crucial time in her life, when she needs his comfort to fight off impending madness. In Spain, he notices remarkable changes: The friends he had are gone; many of his former haunts have been destroyed; the road to Almeria, the route of the retreating Republican army, is now dotted with hotels, condominiums, and commercial signs; and more significantly, Mueller is dead, a victim of cancer. To cleanse himself of the past, however, Joshua pays a price. His wife is institutionalized; then, after a prolonged stay at the hospital, she disappears. The novel ends with a loving reconciliation that suggests a change in Richler’s perspective. Still on crutches as a result of his accident, Joshua recuperates at Hornby’s cottage, accompanied by his children, the senator, and Reuben. In the final scene, Pauline returns, and Reuben sees Joshua in the vegetable garden without his cane, being supported by Pauline.

Solomon Gursky Was Here

Solomon Gursky Was Here is Richler’s richest and most complex work, a 150-year chronicle of the ambitious and conniving Gursky family (loosely based on the real-life liquor kings of Montreal, the Bronfmans), weaving back and forth in time from the ill-fated Franklin Expedition in the Arctic to the political uncertainties of modern times. Beneath the surface of what is essentially a mystery story, a search for the elusive but seemingly ubiquitous Solomon Gursky, Richler examines the greed and corruption of society, the nature of the Jewish and Canadian peoples, mythological forces of the past, and the tenuous but compelling hold of love. Although uncompromising in his satiric portrait of the characters, Richter nevertheless alludes to the positive creative power of those who strive for understanding, however difficult the quest may be.

At the center of the novel stands writer Moses Berger, son of failed poet L. B. Berger, who has sold out to the Gurskys. Because of his father, Moses hears of Solomon Gursky at an early age and becomes obsessed with the almost mythical nature of this character. The alcoholic Moses, more a follower than the leader that his name suggests, investigates stories and documents and uncovers clues about why Solomon decided to resist the purely materialistic interests of his brothers Bernard, the ruthless businessman who has built his fortune by bootlegging, and Morrie, his unctuous partner. Moses discovers that Solomon’s enigmatic grandfather, Ephraim, was a criminal once imprisoned on Botany Bay, by incredible ingenuity the only survivor of the Franklin Expedition, a shaman of Eskimos who taught them Yiddish, and an energetic profligate perplexing in his moral ambiguity. Ephraim is, however, both a comic manifestation and a serious vital force of Judaism, instilling imagination and realism in Solomon, his spiritual heir.

Moses’ search for the “real” Solomon, then, is an attempt to reclaim his past as a Jew and participate in the redemptive value of this figure, who takes on the mythic qualities of the raven that insinuates itself into a diversity of situations to provoke the apathetic and the misguided. Although Moses cannot quite verify all the incarnations of the mysterious Solomon, he suspects that Solomon has influenced many of the nobler acts that occur: the attempt to take over Bernard’s McTavish distillery, the creation of the Israeli Air Force, and the success of the raid on Entebbe. By trying to restore order in his own life, through research and the dogged pursuit of the truth concerning Solomon, Moses begins to understand that honest engagement, not exploitation of life, is a source of value and meaning. No one is spared in Richler’s caustic view, but some can glimpse hope, however concealed it may be.

Barney’s Version

In some respects, Moses’ search for truth extends into Barney’s Version, published almost a decade after Solomon Gursky Was Here. In this novel, however, Richler creates a character who risks becoming a parody not only of the author’s earlier characters but also of the author himself. Barney Panofsky—“trash” television producer, lifelong Montrealer, and rabid hockey fan—is a man whose passions have often been too strong for his own good. Among other fiascoes, he drinks too much, smokes cigars obsessively, bungled three marriages, and potentially committed murder. His faults become an issue, however, only when he learns that Terry McIver, a friend from his youthful years in Paris, is about to publish an autobiography. Rightfully afraid of what Terry has to say about him, Barney immediately sets to penning his memoirs, his version of past events from which the novel’s title is born.

The central action of Barney’s Version is at turns poignant and hilarious. As expected, Barney recounts history much to his own benefit, including scorching depictions of his first two wives, a “martyred” feminist icon and a stereotypical Jewish princess. He rarely offers conscious insight into his own shortcomings and, in fact, often forgets or revises details of his life at its most crucial moments. Still, Barney manages to make his audience feel sympathy for him, especially in recalling his, Barney’s “heart’s desire,” and his likely soul mate. What ultimately emerges from Barney’s memoir is a credible protagonist—foul-mouthed, hedonistic, sometimes oblivious, infrequently accepting blame—who manages to retain his desire for “true love” and for a creative outlet beyond the shallow commercialism of his television production company. As with Richler’s other works, Barney becomes an enigmatic hero, tainted by his world experiences, yet still not devoid of hope.

Nevertheless, Barney’s hope feels less substantial than the kind exhibited by characters in Richler’s earlier fiction. One wonders if Barney truly longs for a better world, or simply for one in which people like Terry McIver do not threaten to reveal his secrets. This question is reinforced by the vitriol that Barney occasionally heaps on some of Richler’s most familiar targets (feminists, Quebecer separatists, pretentious Jews, pseudointellectuals, vegetarians, antismoking zealots, and just about any other standard-bearer of political correctness). Despite the ongoing matter of whether Barney did or did not kill his former friend Boogie, the momentum of the novel sometimes lags, feeling less like a well-plotted story than like a meandering path between Barney’s occasional rants. Though unequivocally humorous, such tirades sometimes feel more like a lecture from Barney (or perhaps straight from Richler himself) in which the protagonist’s own foibles are tragically overlooked in his attempt to decimate his targets.

Whether he is a narrow-minded curmudgeon or a keen social satirist, Barney does extend Richler’s quirky vision of the world with undeniable force. Perhaps it is a mistake to ask for moderation from a writer like Richler. His work has always been effective because of its raw power, its unsparing depiction of any character type that happened to drift beneath the author’s lens. Richler was praised widely for the richness of his comic vision and for his keenly observed, unsentimental portrait of Montreal’s inhabitants (Jew and non-Jew alike). Through an imaginative extension of this vision, Richler developed into a novelist of importance, with his message transcending the limited boundaries of St. Urbain Street to assume universal significance.

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