At his wedding—his second—Barney Panofsky confides to a friend, “I'm in love. For the first time in my life I am truly, seriously, irretrievably in love.” His wife of less than an hour overhears this and embraces him, “And so am I honey, and so am I.” But he was not speaking of her. He was speaking of a woman he had met minutes ago and is about to flee the wedding party to pursue—to persuade her that she, and not the Second Mrs. Panofsky, is the one who holds the key to his heart.

It is an extraordinary moment in one of the weirdest wedding scenes on literary record. Barney is marrying the Second Mrs. Panofsky—whom he never gives a name—out of a transient impulse toward respectability that he will sabotage with every waking breath. Even as he goes through the ceremony he is wishing he were at the Montreal Forum, where the Canadiens hockey team is playing for the Stanley Cup against Toronto. (It is 1959, and “les habitants” will go on to victory.) When Barney and his bride are pronounced man and wife, he kisses her “and made straight for the bar. ‘What's the score?’”

As a comic novelist with a long list of journalistic credits, Mordecai Richler doesn't command the sort of hushed reverence that attends other Canadian writers, like Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields. Yet he has been around longer than any of them—some 40 years—has 10 novels to his credit counting this one, and, dividing his time between Montreal and London, he is Canada's most cosmopolitan writer. In addition, he is its funniest, most accomplished social satirist, as readers of his two previous novels, Joshua Then and Now, and Solomon Gursky Was Here, are well aware. In a literary culture that confuses solemnity with seriousness, Richler, like Rodney Dangerfield, “don't get no respect.” But he has always had readers.

In Barney's Version Richler has written a delectable, side-splitting comedy of humiliation. His hero (who is also his villain, his clown, his warrior, his poet, his sentimentalist, his trickster, his alter id, and his alter Yid) goes toe-to-toe with the world in a game of ego-roulette: Each human encounter is a zero-sum contest of shame or be shamed, of do unto others before others do unto you. The Brazen Rule. And he plays it with a full arsenal of monologues, comebacks and one-liners, extracting every last microgram of humor from such venerable comic standbys as aging, sex, money, cuckoldry, culture, art, embarrassment, the literary life, narcissism, as well as the less promising subjects of Alzheimer's disease, Canadian politics and death.

At 66, Barney Panofsky is a three time loser at marriage. He has liver spots on his hands, blank spots in his memory and urine spots on his trousers. He smokes Montecristo cigars, drinks single malt Scotch and his film company, Totally Useless Productions Ltd., has made a small fortune grinding out trash TV programs for the Canadian market. Cantankerous, combative and politically reactionary, he harbors social attitudes so paleolithic that they would bring a blush to the cheek of Homo erectus. Brought to trial after the disappearance of his friend Bernard “Boogie” Moscovitch, whom he had caught in flagrante delicto with the Second Mrs. Panofsky, he may even be a murderer.

Now alone, Barney remains hopelessly stuck on his third wife Miriam (yes, the one he pursued at his second wedding), who left him after he helped himself just one time to a blonde and then haplessly confessed. It never dawns on him that he might have been cunningly set up, as he most assuredly was.

What keeps the book from becoming a sodden lament for a life gone to the dogs is Barney himself, who supplies its hum and buzz. He is a gamecock even in decline: a cornucopia of stories, jokes, barbs, and scornful opinions. With his jaundiced eye, wicked tongue and soul well marinated in grievances, he is a commissar of the contrary, a successor to Jonathan Swift, H. L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Dr. Johnson, all of whom he acknowledges and quotes. He prefers the company of bibulous and sharp-tongued lawyers, journalists, inside dopesters, and con men at his local bars—Dink's or Jumbo's—to that of any of his wives, including the treasured Miriam.

On the subject of modern art, for example, he recalls Leo Bishinsky, a fellow roisterer in Paris during the palmy days after World War II when young Americans and Canadians decamped to Europe, where living was cheap and dreams were plentiful:

A garage in Montparnasse served as Leo's atelier, and there he labored on his huge triptychs, mixing his paints in buckets and applying them with a kitchen mop. On occasion he would swish his mop around, stand back ten feet, and let fly. Once, when I was there, the two of us sharing a toke, he thrust his mop at me. ‘Have a go,’ he said.

Leo's paintings now hang in the Tate and the Guggenheim. They sell for millions “to junk-bond mavens and arbitrage gurus.”

Barney's bilious views range over contemporary politics and culture: Quebec separatism and the Québecois language laws, antismoking activism, animal rights, anti-Semitism (including Jewish anti-Semitism), New Age spiritualism, Hollywood Leftism and Leftism all around, and of course feminism. About the Hollywood Ten, the famous blacklisted writers of the 1950s, he snorts: “I had considerable respect for the Hollywood Ten as people, but not as writers of even the second rank. That driven bunch invested so much integrity in their foolish, guilt-ridden politics that they had none left for their work. Tell me, did Franz Kafka need a swimming pool?”

It is for feminism, however, that Barney saves his heavy artillery. When Clara Charnofsky, becomes pregnant during their footloose days in Paris, Barney does the manly thing and proposes marriage. Alas, Clara, a painter, poet and dabbler in astrology, palmistry, tarot, and Satanism, also dabbles in other men. When the still-born child turns out to be black, Barney packs his bags for Canada while Clara prepares a last-ditch gesture of reconciliation that fails when Barney's concierge forgets to deliver a message. Barney finds Clara dead, the table set for a candlelit dinner.

But her drawings and manuscripts survive. They are published years later as The Virago's Versebook to feminist acclaim, and pretty soon something called The Clara Charnofsky Foundation for Wimyn is handing out hefty grants, while Barney is gaining international notoriety as the “Calibanovitch” of one of her poems. It isn't hard to figure that Richler has cast his protagonist as Ted Hughes to Clara's Sylvia Plath in this story.

The wives of Barney Panofsky form a neat triad: the bohemian, the bourgeois and the true love. Although the bourgeois Second Mrs. Panofsky gets short shrift in the novel, her loopy, rambling monologues contain some of its best lines. Long-distance phone conversations with her mother from her Paris honeymoon reveal her to be the Madame Bovary of chatter and the Captain Ahab of shopping:

Yes, the waist is back and I've still got mine. I am not being snarky. How many times do I have to tell you that you have a terrific figure for a mature woman. It's from Dior. Yeah, I wore it this morning. Boy, did I ever turn lots of heads. It's pale blue shantung pleats with a cape collar, and over it I wore my new coat, it's a Chanel, a cardigan, nubby beige wool piped with navy blue silk. I'll wear it to the temple on Rosh Hashanah, Arlene will die on the spot. And wait till you see my shoes and the handbag that goes with. …

Move over Molly Bloom. The Second Mrs. Panofsky is in town.

Miriam, by virtue of being perfect and therefore ultimately too good for Barney, is the least interesting of the lot. Beautiful, gracious, deeply loving as well as provocatively sensual—an icon out of the Victoria's Secret catalog—she is destined to leave Barney and finally does so for one Blair Hopper, formerly Hauptman, who had come to Canada as a draft evader in 1969 and begun a flirtation with Miriam while taking refuge at their cabin. Blair is all that his predecessor was not—a handyman, a gardener, a social activist, an animal rights zealot, and, it seems, a man who certainly knows value when he sees it.

No question, Barney had it coming. It would not be too much to say that he is a schmuck. The downside of this for the reader is that he is impossible to like. The upside is his schmuck's-eye-view of the world, which is ruthless, unsparing, and finely attuned to the vanity of human wishes, including his own. He'll do anything for a joke or a prank or a withering remark. He doesn't even mind being beaten up for his one-liners, if he can get them off before the blow falls. During his interrogation after Boogie's disappearance, he gets it in the solar plexus for baiting the police.

As Homo dyspeptus, Barney sows the landscape with his grievances, finding egotism, fashion and self-aggrandizement everywhere he looks. He belongs to a long tradition of the crumbum hero that goes back to Dostoyevsky's underground man, but I don't recall any of the previous avatars being so funny. His pseudonymous letters to the Clara Charnofsky Foundation for Wimyn are typical of his savage humor. “Dear Person-hoods. Hi there. I'm writing to apply for a grant on behalf of CRAP (Chaps Resolutely Against Prejudice). …” Another: “Shalom Sisters. I was born Jemima (after the eldest of Job's three daughters) Fraser in Chicago 35 years ago, but since I came to the town of Dimonah in the Negev four years ago I pass by the name of Zipporah Ben Yehudah.”

Barney Panofsky gets away with being a jerk because he has panache. As a social critic he has an agile intelligence and a well-stocked mind; one is struck by the sheer density of his thought. As a raconteur and comic he's got the lines. And what reader doesn't hunger nowadays for a bracing dose of political incorrectness, which Barney delivers with the metronomic regularity of a man who has studied all his life to be in opposition? It is hardly a judgment on him that he winds up in a nursing home being fed roast brisket—Ashkenazi soul food—with a spoon.

Alzheimer's can strike teetotalers and vegetarians, even paper recyclers. But along his particular road to senility Barney performs for us a bitter, fractured comic dance that keeps us amazed and mortified and entertained.