The first time Joshua Shapiro [of Joshua Then and Now] and his prospective father-in-law, Senator Stephen Andrew Hornby, meet, neither wastes time on preliminaries. (p. 30)

In this contentious encounter between Joshua and the senator you have the book's major themes in miniature: Jewish cheek pitted against Anglo-Canadian snobbery; the special asperity that passes between two cultures that recognize and fear in each other the stubbornness and drive that they cherish in themselves; and the refusal of the modern Jew, who is no longer deterred by pogroms and legal disabilities, to knuckle under. (pp. 30-1)

What is not yet apparent in this fierce testing of wills is that it is the first step toward the eventual reconciliation of both men on grounds entirely congenial to both. Joshua's marriage to Pauline Hornby fulfills not only St. Urbain Street's dream of the mansions of Outremont, but also Anglo Canada's dream of the ghetto Jew….

As Richler portrays the social drama of Jewish enterprise and success, the Jew muscles in or marries in (the daughter being the soft spot in Anglo cultural armor) only to learn that, not only was it easy, but the conquered province is not so strange a place: its inner values—striving, achievement, competitive superiority—are much like his own, if not so desperately enacted, while its visible cultural practices—the golf, the drinking, the snobbery—are readily tolerated, even happily taken up. The meeting of Jew and WASP in marriage and business is the discovery, by one puritan culture gone soft, of another much like itself….

Joshua Shapiro is another one of Richler's Jewish arrivistes, like Duddy Kravitz and Jerry "the Boy Wonder" Dingleman of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Jacob Hersh of St. Urbain's Horseman…. He comes on like a Canadian Howard Cosell, or, more precisely, like Reuben Shapiro, former lightweight champion of Canada, who once went eight rounds with Sammy Angott and, when his fighting days were finished, did odd jobs for the syndicate. Joshua's most vivid childhood memories of Reuben are of his leaving home in strange cars—by climbing into the trunk. Joshua may be a literary sort who mourns for Republican Spain in his spare time, but he is every inch Reuben's boy. "My father brought me up to believe I would only be making one trip round," he boasts. "So I want a good life available on terms that do not offend me. I also intend to enjoy myself." You won't find those sentiments in the Talmud, but they are no less Jewish for that.

As such unrelieved bragging suggests, Joshua is a fairly unpleasant fellow, and indeed, though his exploits are unfailingly vivid and engaging—even fun—they rarely elicit from us much enthusiasm for Joshua himself. He is as callow as he is clever, and, one suspects, Richler means him to be an anti-type, to stand against the more common brands of self-congratulation that are endemic to Jewish fiction. From Sholom Aleichem and his Tevye to Bellow and Malamud, with their Herzogs, Sammlers, Bobers, and Dubins, Jewish fiction has repeatedly thrown up figures of wisdom and endurance, observance and rectitude, who are always asking rigged questions like "How shall a good man live?" and showing, after a moment of dubious hesitation, that they knew, they knew, they knew all along. Richler, by contrast, adheres to a tradition of dissent that runs from Isaac Babel's Odessa stories through Daniel Fuchs's Williamsburg Trilogy and Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, which finds more color, more life, and more fidelity to the facts of Jewish existence in the demimonde of hustlers, heavies, strong-arm types, and men on the make than in the heroes of menshlichkeit. This countermyth should not be mistaken for Jewish "self-hatred" or embarrassment, for it is a self-regard of a different sort, in which vigor and tenacity are celebrated instead of saintliness. Richler's affection for these quarrelsome, grasping Jews is genuine, and if he fails at last to make his Joshua an appealing figure, we should not conclude that he loves him any the less. And yet, for all the attention lavished on him, Joshua never comes to life as a person, and remains throughout a cultural attitude: a hunger, a rhythm, an accelerated pace, a violence of mind.

If I've slighted Richler's plot, it is not because Joshua's story lacks interest, but because the episodic march of his adventures never amounts to a destiny. Things happen to him because Richler wants them to, rather than because they have to. However, because Richler has a wild imagination, Joshua's life is eventful in a bizarre sort of way. (pp. 31-2)

But all this frenetic activity takes a back seat to the drama, now become the comedy, of race and class that so possesses Richler, and to the intricate harmonics of his voice, which simply overpower his narrative. This voice is the demiurge of Richler's writing, a supersonic machine that propels him forward from one episode to the next, turning everything it touches into anecdote and comedy….

Richler sets a fast pace; you have to sprint to keep up. "There is nothing he will not try to package with humor and anguish," Roger Sale once complained of an earlier Richler novel, and while the point holds no less true for Joshua Then and Now, the sheer virtuosity of Richler's style has to be conceded. Richler is a high-energy artist, one of the best in the business, and if you enjoy watching him perform and can forget that the novel is now supposed to be a cultural sacrament, "Ulysses or bust" emblazoned on every dust jacket, then this book will give you your money's worth. (p. 32)