Mordecai Richler died on July 3, and within minutes of the
announcement there was a stampede from the grand panjandrums
of “CanLit” to conscript him posthumously into
the ranks of “Canadian novelists.” Mordecai was a novelist who
happened to be Canadian, which isn’t quite the same thing, and he
spent much of his life making gleeful digs about all the great
writers who were, as he put it, “world famous in Canada.”
Richler, by contrast, was world famous in, among other places,
Italy, where his last novel, Barney’s Version, is a bestseller
in its seventh printing and hugely popular among a population not
known as great novel-readers. The word “Richleriano” has become
the accepted shorthand for “politically incorrect.”
Richler was certainly Richleriano. In Solomon Gursky Was Here,
there’s a scene set in the early Seventies in which one
middle-aged character, forced to play host to a gay son and his
lover, staggers drunk into the bathroom to check the pencil mark
he’s drawn on the jar of Vaseline. His wife is broken-hearted,
he’s filled with disgust. “It’s not that I’m prejudiced against
faggots, it’s just that I don’t like them,” he says, pouring
himself another Scotch. It is a satirical moment, but the pain
underpinning it is true in a way that the approved supportive
bland uplift is not. Yet I wouldn’t bet on any tyro