We must separate the writer from his or her fictional hero. This is a first rule of literary judgment. Joshua Shapiro is the hero. He is a writer….

Joshua did become famous as a star of personality on Canadian television, for which he had contempt. "Anybody good on camera was an abomination to him, yet he owed his reputation to television."

Mordecai Richler, on the other hand, according to his publisher, "is generally considered Canada's most important writer…." All right, now I am clear that Joshua Shapiro cannot be Richler, and I am glad. Here is a book in which viewpoint is so perfectly rendered, so exquisitely pure, that the author successfully places himself at an invisible distance.

This leaves Joshua exposed, and the trouble may be that it's Joshua I don't like. I find it difficult to root for him. I don't like him. He is one of those people who reviews books to slam writers—"scabrous reviews, outbidding everybody in invective."…

Writers like Joshua lose their moral grasp. The pranks of boyhood are crimes when men commit them. Joshua instructs his friend Murdoch how to live on nonexistent credit. The passage is amusing if you find it so, and there are others, for Richler at his best is sprightly, crisp, crackling, good at cataloguing things.

When the pranks of boyhood bear consequences in the mature (anyhow later) years I become sick inside watching it happen. Joshua's desperation produces calamity….

Joshua appears to be very confused at this point, and so am I. "Although Shapiro," says his fictional antagonist, "could not be reckoned a writer of the first rank, he had written a book of some significance on the Spanish Civil War and was considered by many to be a sporting journalist of note." This is a fair, just, correct analysis of Joshua by Richler. Richler is also considered by many people to be a sporting journalist of note, as well as a novelist.

This is his first novel in nine years, a masterpiece of imitative form, resplendent with every imaginable failure of characterization, relevance, style, or grammar; loaded with gratuitous obscenity, genital prurience, pointless melodrama, disconnected anecdotage; it contains a very large cast of unrealized people—exactly the novel poor wretched Joshua would write if he could gather himself together long enough for sustained work.

Successful, famous, and possessed of a demonic sense of humor, Joshua is living a kind of satiric Pilgrim's Progress, making his way through a crazy world with a few good breaks and a lot of chutzpah.

Despite the vast number of topical references that contribute to its bite, Joshua Then and Now is good enough to last, perhaps Richler's best novel to date. Moving back and forth in time and place, from Canada in the 1940s to Spain and England in the 1950s and 1960s, the book never loses stride in its pursuit of the truth, whether that truth is mockable or tragic or, most often, somewhere in between. Every character gets a fair and full treatment, and Richler's considerable ability as a humorist is apparent throughout.

What lifts Joshua Then and Now from being a very funny novel to being a fine one, however, is the power of its theme. Richler has chosen Auden's "Lay your sleeping head, my love" as his epigram, and it is love that suffuses this book with delight. Love of place, ideas, and friends is rare enough in contemporary literature; married love, the kind that can outlast any sort of trouble, is almost nonexistent. Joshua has it all, in spades.