Word: richler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Saul Bellow had remained in Quebec, Mordecai Richler would be Canada's second best Jewish novelist. That would be nothing to agitate a stick at. Most of Richler's 10 novels, which include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain's Horsemen, are inspired comedies about Montreal's Jewish community, of which the author, now 66, remains a member...
...writer's close, conflicted ties to his birthplace give his work its special flavor, not to mention its distinctive sense of the not quite familiar. Richler's raffish characters could be from New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, except that they are nuts about hockey, spice their conversation with French as well as Yiddish and have legal access to Cuban cigars...
...bumptious codger Barney Panofsky of Barney's Version (Knopf; 368 pages; $25) is more than a familiar Richler hero. He is the author's fullest expression of the type: a pleasure-loving scoundrel with a generous romantic streak and a gift that can turn schmoozing into literature. Barney makes his sizable living producing Canadian-content TV series like McIver of the RCMP ("big on bonking scenes in canoes and igloos"). He calls his company Totally Unnecessary Productions, a name that flaunts his self-loathing but, more important, pre-empts the scorn of his artistic betters...
...Richler's lusty creation never seems "larger than life," a cliche that underestimates the size of life. Better to say that Barney fills an expansive and unconventional existence. He is the son of Montreal's first Jewish policeman, Izzy Panofsky, who would have been at home in the old Odessa underworld. The younger Panofsky spent the early '50s in Paris, where he debauched with expats and married a crazy poet whose suicide ensured her canonization by academic feminists. What Barney calls "the true story of my wasted life" may seem undisciplined and chronologically impaired. In fact his memoir is cunningly...
...signs have been there for some years. In the '70s, the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler tried to rent a tuxedo in Hollywood for the Oscars and, he later wrote, confronted "rack upon rack of outrageous evening wear. Purple velvet, ruffles, suede." Richler described what happened when he asked if the store had such a thing as a conventional black tuxedo:"'Yes, certainly,' the tailor said, bringing something out of the back room. 'And now tell me, sir, will you be wearing high heels...