[In the following review, Bethune debates the quality of Richler's first novel, The Acrobats, concluding that the work is “pretty good on its own merits and full of promise for the future.”]

In 1951 Mordecai Richler, 19 years old and burning with writerly ambition, left Montreal for a two-year stay in Paris and Spain. There he completed his first novel, The Acrobats, published in 1954 and long out of print. Now reissued by McClelland & Stewart, The Acrobats takes place in Valencia in 1951, during the Spanish city's famous spring fiesta. A large cast of characters somersault past—and into—one another: Jews and Gentiles, straights and gays, fascists and communists, impoverished Europeans and rich American tourists. In the midst of this madhouse—the Valencians are every bit as incendiary as the foreigners, nightly setting ablaze huge effigies stuffed with fireworks—is painter André Bennett. The scion of a wealthy Westmount family, he has fled abroad in search of expiation and something to believe in after the death of his Jewish lover during a botched abortion.

The Acrobats is very much a young man's novel, charged with sexuality, deliberately crafted to shock elders and full of withering contempt for their hypocritical world. That's never more clear than when expat boy artist André speaks for Richler, the expat boy novelist, on Canadian culture. “Mediocrity draped in the maple leaf! Sonnets by the aging virgin granddaughters of Tory tradesmen evoking the memories of rather un-Presbyterian passions … Kultchir as celebrated by imperial favour annually consisting of 50 gold guineas for the horse that wins the King's Plate and an honorary award for either virgin poetess or pipe-smoking historian-novelist.” And then there's the looming presence of Ernest Hemingway, probably inevitable for a novel written during, and set in, the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. (More surprising are the not infrequent echoes of Raymond Chandler.)

But despite its derivative atmosphere, patches of bad writing and occasional incoherence—including an over-the-top moral condemnation of Paris that could scarcely have been bettered by a virgin poetess—The Acrobats is both pretty good on its own merits and full of promise for the future. (Richler scholars may be interested in an early use of the word gay for homosexual, and in a character called Barney. Richler hints at why he chose that name, one he resurrected in 1997 for the title character of his last—and for many critics, best—novel, Barney's Version. The action is brisk and the characters—for the most part—sympathetically well-rounded, even the fascists.

And while Hemingway's shadow may have been inescapable, Richler is well aware of it and mocks the American writer's influence, most notably when he has a character clutch his crotch and lament his war wound. “Then, his raving soul unzippered, naked, he collapsed in his chair, whimpering. Juanito shrugged. ‘I think he is drunk.’” Even the intense André, whose existential crisis has clearly exasperated Richler by the novel's end, shows flashes of the sardonic wit that would dominate the writer's later works.

The New York Times, one of the few North American publications to review The Acrobats, was a shade supercilious but quite prophetic. “With this novel out of his system,” the reviewer concluded, Richler's future books “may be entirely mature and rewarding.”