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