In their themes and motifs, Mordecai Richler's novels return regularly to a constant set of preoccupations. Despite this consistency, however, his career as a novelist has undergone some interesting alterations in terms of his moral attitudes towards his favourite preoccupations. This change of outlook has naturally been accompanied by a change in style and genre. It would have been difficult, on the basis of his early naturalistic novels, to anticipate the satirist and caricaturist who emerged with The Incomparable Atuk and Cocksure…. Occasional satirical elements are utilized by most novelists. It is another matter altogether to step from a dominant narrative mode of realistic characterization, verisimilitude of action and psychological plausibility to a dominant mode of conscious caricature in characterization, purposeful implausibility of action and fantasy in events. For a novelist to alter his style and narrative mode so decisively, a deliberate change in moral outlook must have occurred…. One of the theses of this interpretation is that, philosophically, Richler has moved from a tentative Romanticism to a kind of Classicism. (pp. ix-x)

In Richler's first novel, The Acrobats, we can already see most of the materials that recur in his later work: power, egoism, self-realization, struggle for survival, the conflict of generations and youthful rebelliousness, the need to escape from a confining environment, the sense of moral disillusionment and the fear of failure. The form of his first novel (and of all his naturalistic novels) is that most traditional of fictional structures: the attempted progress of the sensitive young man … in escaping the fetters of an inhibiting situation and in advancing towards a form of independence, realization of what he takes to be his inherent potentialities or worldly success and recognition. In other words Richler's theme is that of the attempted rise from rags to riches, on several moral and aesthetic levels. (p. x)

This configuration, of course, is not surprising in a novelist. It is a truism that the novel is the bourgeois literary form. Theorists of the novel, like Ian Watt, have emphasized that the novel is specifically the literary form which is structured by the sense of time and movement as progressive, qualitative change, i.e. the notion that time must not be wasted and that the measurement of time should also measure changes in the person's status or situation…. Naturally it reflects a society where social mobility and the idea of self-development are both possible and social and psychological imperatives. The novel, therefore, is the form which best expresses romantic individualism…. Richler's novels are located in bourgeois time. His young men in a hurry or on the make (whether the hustler, Duddy Kravitz; the impatient aesthete, André Bennett; or the mixture of the two, Noah Adler) are the distant cousins, not only of Paul Morel, Stephen Dedalus and Sammy Glick, but also of Raskolnikov, Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary and Hedda Gabler. Like these nineteenth century heroes and heroines, they are manic depressive (the characteristic bourgeois psychosis, if we can believe the evidence of Ibsen and Flaubert). They urgently need to succeed and are haunted by the fear of failure; they alternate between delusions of triumph and a suicidal sense of utter emptiness.

Richler's novels differ, however, in that they are obviously of the middle of the twentieth century and lack much of the partial optimism current in the previous century. His characters are acutely aware that they come after the disillusionment with several twentieth-century revolutions and causes…. Richler's characters, for all their ambition and energy, really know from the beginning that either they are defeated or their outcomes will be much drearier than their apparent victories might indicate. Duddy Kravitz, for example, appears successful in achieving his ambition. But there is every indication that he has been metamorphosed into something very like his antagonist, the odious Jerry Dingleman.

A further problem for Richler's protagonists (and it is a problem, often, with the novels themselves) is that they do not know what it is they are seeking…. They insist that salvation lies only in the adoption of personal values, but they are not sure which personal values to hold. The statement, in fact, becomes a mechanical formula with which they try to persuade themselves of something, rather than any passionately held and confident sense of personal identity. This becomes a problem for the reader as well as for the fictional character and represents the greatest weakness in Richler's writings. I don't mean to suggest that Richler ought to supply his characters with a facile affirmation. The problem is a genuine one. (This, I suppose, is why some people have referred to Richler's "existentialism." But this kind of comment, besides betraying a lack of understanding of existentialism as a philosophical standpoint, is itself a facile evasion of a problem and a retreat into a mechanistic formula.)

To be frank, it gets rather boring to be told repeatedly that all the good old causes are dead, that one knows what one dislikes but not what one likes, and then to be expected to be deeply concerned with the activities and fate of a very self-serving and self-pitying character. (pp. x-xii)

For myself, I am always rather puzzled by critics … who take at face value the moral posturings of many of Richler's main characters. After all, if we look at them with a cold eye, we often get a picture in which they appear something like this: they are egocentric and insensitive to others; they are ruthless and are basically indifferent even to those they sometimes claim to love; they will exploit or misuse their closest friends and relatives often on not much more than a whim; their claims to their own moral sensitivity and dilemmas are generally self-serving; they are usually contemptuous of the causes served by others at great personal risk; and they give little evidence of possessing either the kind of intelligence or knowledge which would be required to sustain the complexities and subtleties of the moral consciousness to which they pretend. Indeed, most of Richler's youthful rebels and idealistic questers share many characteristics with the hypocritical older generation, or the corrupt society, or the oppressors against whom they appear to be in revolt. (p. xiii)

[Nevertheless, Richler makes] claims on the reader to view with sympathy and concern the problems of his heroes. As many critics have pointed out, the author is often emotionally engaged himself with his heroes. This clear call for sympathy with these figures, many of whom objectively have unsympathetic or dull personalities, has divided Richler's readers. These are those who find the novels almost wholly objectionable because of the repugnant qualities of so many of the characters. Others are taken in by the postures adopted by his sensitive or lonely young men and thus uncritically proceed to sentimentalize these figures as courageous knights who assault the unrelieved evil of a corrupt society…. (p. xiv)

There is another possible approach to the reading of Richler's novels. One of the most interesting facts about these novels is that the ostensible heroes and the ostensible villains share many qualities. It is entirely possible to regard the apparent heroes unsympathetically and to respond even to the most malevolent figures, like the Nazi Kraus, Melech Adler, or Karp, sympathetically. Indeed, Richler's ability to make his characters sufficiently complex and humanly ambiguous, in a perfectly plausible manner, and to supply enough information so that we understand how they got to be the way they are is one of his most striking achievements. Some critics may fail to see the humanity in an apparently monstrous figure or naively may be taken in by a putatively sympathetic figure, but Richler the novelist does not make these mistakes.

Others have noted that Richler's characters are often "survivors" and that much of their energy is consumed by the strategies of survival in a competitive and hostile world. This is true enough. The Richler characters often have the wary, suspicious, necessarily egoistic psychology of the survivor. They move through life like tacticians, are survivors of concentration camps; various forms of persecution, war, or poverty; or simply painfully traumatic personal experiences and shattered dreams and ideals. They are frequently the floating debris of the wreckage of the modern period and this mental set conditions them to ruthlessness, emotional detachment and scepticism. Whatever hopes they have are tempered by an instinctive awareness of great odds against them. This often concludes in cynicism, barely suppressed hysteria, or submissive resignation. (p. xv)

This leads us to a consideration which is at the heart of Richler's books. The figures of the romantic individualist and the survivor merge. But not only in the obvious sense that the survivor is perforce an isolated individual. What I am suggesting is that the very concept of the romantic quest of the individual hero, either for worldly success or for self-realization, is itself treated in Richler's novels as a part of the debris that lingers after a cultural wreckage. Although Richler's heroes, from André Bennett to Duddy Kravitz, embrace this romantic concept, the concept itself is no longer wholly intact for these characters. There is something inauthentic, even spurious, about the quality of their hopes and quests. It is intimately related to their sense that they know what they oppose, but not what they positively want. And it is the reason they cannot formulate their ambitions with any more precision than that. There is the sense with several of Richler's more important characters that they must, even involuntarily, engage in individualistic, quixotic quests—although they can't say why and are sceptical if any reasons are proffered. Ironically, the young Richler hero has a culturally induced instinct—almost a blind instinct—to be rebellious, individualistic, iconoclastic. He must revolt against an Establishment and its values, whether that establishment be represented by a paternal figure, a teacher or professor, a philistine capitalist or a religious fanatic. They know they don't like these things, but will quickly admit that they can't suggest anything that is necessarily better. Significantly, collective actions like socialism are also spurned, but a bit more respectfully. (pp. xvi-xvii)

Characteristically, Richler's protagonists are those romantic, adolescent (of whatever age) "rebels without a cause" popularized by James Dean in the 1950s. This hero has no particular notions about the reconstruction of society or about the reconstruction of himself. His individualism is a matter of posture, a stance without content he adopts in opposition to his society. Hence, it is often expressed as a generational conflict between fathers (or grandfathers) and sons, as this is generally the most content-less of conflicts and the most readily articulated in terms of style of life—as only styles change drastically in a single generation. (pp. xvii-xviii)

I don't mean to pretend that some of Richler's figures do not suffer genuinely at the hands of their parents or communities. In many cases they clearly do and they are sometimes authentically shocked or repelled by hypocrisies they encounter. But frequently the degree of their contempt seems unwarranted by the objective quality of the putative cause…. Throughout the novels there are many instances where a younger man voluntarily assumes the psychological role of son to an older man or woman and then turns against them. The older person is usually childless, but wants children, and seeks out surrogate children who will betray them. If the youthful Richler hero may be described as simply wanting to "do his thing," his thing often enough seems to be devouring his parent figures. The surrogate father figures, like Norman Price and Theo Hall, pay their nostalgic respects to their own vanished youth by willingly presenting themselves for the feast, masochistically re-enacting themselves in their surrogate children.

Clearly defined motives and desires do not exist in relation to these figures, even for Duddy Kravitz and his ambition to acquire land. Rather, there are threads of various possible motives, often mutually contradictory, in the same person: escape from poverty and weakness, a search for economic security, the vague need to define one's own identity, a desire for a form of ecstasy, and others. To put it another way, their motives are a mixture of the varieties of motives that can be isolated in the heroes and heroines of nineteenth century literature. (pp. xviii-xix)

The repression and distortion of aesthetic values into their antitheses is one of the themes of Richler's writings. The more closely one examines the typical Richler character, the more evident it becomes that his actions are predicated on the idea of the expression of sensibility itself. It is not only the idea that the inner, private sensibility ought to remain inviolate … Richler's characters often aspire as well towards existing on a plane of pure, exquisite sensibility; a form of ecstasy. This, too, is in the Romantic tradition and is usually represented as the beatific side of the romantic individualist's medal. It is the reverse, yet the mirror image … of the individualist as robber baron or mercenary buccaneer. (pp. xix-xx)

As early as André Bennett in The Acrobats, Richler has figures who are partly driven by a sense of guilt or the memory of a dishonourable past of which they would like to purge themselves. Their striving for autonomy and the kind of fresh start which might release them from past generations and traditions is related to this. (p. xx)

The apparently inconsistent and confused motivations, the intransigent negativism, the moral attitudinizing, and the nebulously inarticulate anti-authoritarianism of Richler's heroes can be resolved and made articulate by the idea of sensibility. The characters usually will themselves into the attitude of the neo-Byronic hero. Thumbing their noses at an Establishment becomes the main expression and content of their rebellion, an act more of gesture than of coherent substance. A curious determinism, in fact, has molded them into the style and expression of "free spirits." Psychologically and historically they are the consequences of the romantic cult of self-expression, long after the substance has been drained out of the concept and all that remains are the involuntary reflexes of the old romantic revolution. As Marx said of historical repetition, the first time is tragedy and the second time is farce. History weighs heavily, if unconsciously, on these youths. But it is a specific history which has run its course and has left them only with the possibility of compulsively mechanical gestures which once, perhaps, had meaning.

These youths, after all, are the inheritors of the propaganda of the romantic era. Their imaginations have been nourished by the contemporary packaged versions of the dreams of that era: Byronism filtered through Hollywood films, the legends of heroically successful self-made men, and unreal images of a war in Spain ironically made seductively exotic through the songs of the losing side. In the synthetic myths of their popular culture, objective disparities and contradictions merge into a unitary image of glamour where capitalism's rugged individualist and the itinerant revolutionist present a single model to be imitated. Sensing also that this image presents a false model of reality, they nonetheless are fired by the romance they feel it ought to mirror. This accounts for their own mimicry of a posture they know to be anachronistic and their deep resentment of that history and those older generations which foisted such a dream upon them. (pp. xxi-xxii)

[It is] true that the older generation in Richler's work … have been sons to other fathers and have also been inspired and victimized by similar visions. This links the dilemmas of fathers and sons in an intergenerational iron chain of determinism where, with considerable irony, they are almost mechanically programmed to re-enact the ceremonies of "free spirits."

It is for this reason (although the process began in A Choice of Enemies) that in Atuk and Cocksure the most contemptuous satire is reserved for the information media—the world of film, TV, advertising, journalism and publishing—the pop culture industries which manipulate dreams and visions, determine the sensibilities of the populace, tamper with souls en masse. Star Maker (radically complete unto himself, the consummation of Romanticism), in Cocksure, is thus far Richler's most remarkably concentrated symbol for the destructively manipulative force of a spent historical romanticism. (p. xxii)

There is only so far an author can go with a historical and cultural situation which is trapped in a dead-end sensibility of burnt-out romanticism where the sensitive young men of the bourgeois epoch are fated to acting out illusions they can no longer believe. This, of course, is one of the fundamental problems of the novel today. The fact that the novel developed while formulating the ideology of that epoch is an important reason why so many contemporary novels are reduced to synthetically frenetic repetitions of the ethos of Huckleberry Finn. It is as if frenzied overstatement could resurrect the culturally dead the way Baroque art sought to restore the late medieval ethos through exaggeration of expression. An approach to Richler's writings like that of his earlier commentator Warren Tallman, who fundamentally misreads the import and direction of these novels, only sentimentalizes the hybrid Faustianism of a Duddy Kravitz. Reading through American ideological glasses, he sees Richler's themes as variants of the antihistorical innocence of American frontier ideology and manifest destiny at the very moment when Richler is beginning to satirize this romantic Faustianism almost as lucidly as Conrad does in Heart of Darkness. Such an approach cannot account for Richler's tactical shift from involvement to detachment and his adoption of satire as a formal mode (as opposed to satirical flashes in basically naturalistic novels) while maintaining his hold on the same set of cultural materials as subject matter.

After his first four novels, it would appear that Richler clearly realized a need to get away from characters attempting to live according to the measurements of bourgeois time…. As it was, his characters had strong doubts that [progress] was possible or significant even though they tried it. Comic forms, including satire, present one way out of this situation. In satires like Atuk and Cocksure we are no longer in the world of progressive and incremental mobility, even though men and women on the make still inhabit the world of these books. But the focus of interest here is no longer on their progress…. This particular shaping of our responses is assured because the author presents his characters as self-evident stereotypes. As soon as we see them, we know what they are like without waiting for their stories to unfold. We recognize them as caricatures of familiar attitudes and behavior patterns, largely caricatures representing aspects of the world of contemporary popular culture…. The fictional time is relatively static as the characters do not grow and change. Rather, the reader simply sees layers being peeled away which reveal to him more information about the nature and meaning of the relationships and encounters among the various patterns of conduct of which the characters are emblems. The reader's response, therefore, is more cerebral than emotional. The satirical mode is closer to the purely intellectual.

One cannot, of course, assume that Richler will choose always to write in the same vein. As his perceptions of his materials change, so will his fictional techniques. But in these two latest books [Atuk and Cocksure,] he has begun to write comedy of manners and has revealed a spirit far closer to that of Congreve, Swift, and Shaw than one might have guessed from his earlier novels. (pp. xxiii-xxiv)

In my view, there is frequently an element of nihilism in the literary genre of comedy, particularly in its satirical side…. These elements of renewal and nihilism co-exist in a complex and fascinating tension. There is something about comedy that is not open-ended; that inflexibly closes off possibilities and is antipathetic to the idea of growth and change. It is not a form beloved by romantics and most of the great comic artists of English literature have not been romantics. (p. xxv)

An artist formulates and articulates the complex interactions of cultural experience. He does not prescribe for it. Richler makes no attempt at being a philosopher of history or a social visionary. Like many modern writers, he is aware that we are still wrestling with the problems bequeathed to us from the nineteenth century—that, indeed, twentieth century man is still intellectually and emotionally parasitic upon the concepts and dreams that both flourished and began to dissolve in the previous century. We still live with specific historical ghosts. The Romantic Revolution may be over, but its Faustianism is still operative in a thousand posthumous ways. Richler has no facile answers for this cultural situation and he eschews the posturings of prophecy. Proponents of a brave new world do not write comedies of manners. He is a writer devoted to his craft and the purpose of his craft is to articulate experience as it truly is. The immediate task of his craft is to discover fictional strategies for the accurate representation of reality. To represent the current dilemmas of the legacy of romanticism in the cold light of comedy is an illumination we require. (pp. xxv-xxvi)

G. David Sheps, in his introduction to Mordecai Richler, edited by G. David Sheps (copyright 1971; reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, Toronto), Ryerson Press, 1971, pp. ix-xxvi.