A quarter-century after his death, how is Mordecai Richler’s work remembered?

In his final published piece, Mordecai Richler warned readers not to expect too much from their favourite authors. He wasn’t warning about literature. He was cautioning about character. “Too many celebrity writers,” he wrote, “were outrageous liars, philanderers, drunks, druggies, unsuitable babysitters, plagiarists, psychopaths, parasites, cowards, indifferent dads or moms and bad credit risks.”

He then cited the “dismal track records” of several of his own icons: William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, even “goodly” George Orwell. Elsewhere, Richler recommended readers avoid meeting writers they admire, to avoid the disappointment. “I’m not kidding,” he said there, making his point especially clear.

Two months after the piece appeared, Mordecai Richler was dead of cancer at age 70. He died on July 3, 2001, and that summer Canada mourned his passing with a fervour usually reserved for a hockey player or national leader.

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The country had in fact displayed such grief, and shown such respect, twice in the previous 12 months, once for Maurice Richard and the other for Pierre Trudeau. Richler grew up idolizing “The Rocket” and Trudeau had been a friend. All three were cradle Montrealers.

Margaret Atwood lamented the death of Canada’s “grumpy, scathing Diogenes.” CBC legend Peter Gzowski spoke of “that voice over in the corner crying nonsense, pointing out the foibles and being outrageous.”

Prime minister Jean Chrétien paid tribute, but in Quebec, where feelings were still bruised from Richler’s battles with the province’s draconian sign laws, polite remarks were provided by the minister of culture. A prominent Quebec journalist summed up the ambivalence: “English Canadians had lost a hero. French Canadians had lost a villain.”

As the new century unfolded, an era in Canadian cultural life seemed to be winding down. Within a year, Gzowski too would be dead, along with Timothy Findley and Carol Shields.

Inevitably, reputations waxed and waned in the ensuing two-plus decades. Still, the quarter-century mark is a good moment to pose a question about a novelist, essayist and political commenter once so central to the national conversation.

What has happened to Mordecai Richler?

In 1960, a 29-year-old literary prodigy, fresh off his first real success, began firing salvos at Canada. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, already his fourth novel, had recently been published in Toronto, London and New York.

The story of a real estate hustler on the make in Jewish Montreal, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz signalled through its bristling vitality what could – and did, in fact – lie just ahead: a genuine literary scene in English Canada, writing liberated at last from colonial cringe.

From the archives: Creators of Duddy Kravitz: The Musical find their ending, again

Not that Mordecai Richler was in the country to witness the movement his novel was about to kick-start. He had fled Montreal at age 19, eventually for London, where he prospered. Ominously and, it turns out, typically, he treated the critical lauding of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz back home with less gratitude that might have been expected.

“Canada, from the beginning,” he wrote around this time, “was second best. It made us nearly Americans.” Noting a “scarcity of talent,” he declared it “fanciful to talk of Canadian writing.”

Then, on CBC television in 1962, his manner a cross of James Dean cool and Jack Kerouac slacker, Richler delivered the generational sound bite. His homeland, he regretted, remained “here a professor, there a poet, and in between thousands of miles of wheat and indifference.” Canada, meet your Diogenes, then still a young man. Many critics and academics, equally frustrated by our tardy cultural awakening, were thrilled by this brash new voice, if leery of the range and heat of his satiric blowtorch. Readers of Canadian literature, such as they were in the early 1960s, hadn’t a clue.

Though eventually a staple of high-school English curricula, at the outset The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz sold fewer than 1,000 copies. His next novel, The Incomparable Atuk, a send-up of Canadian cultural industries and the noble savage fetish, fared no better in 1963.

“I write out of a general disgust with things,” he warned early on. Or was that a promise? Appreciating the underpinnings to such a strident artistic credo wasn’t easy for Canadians, Anglo or French. Richler’s sensibility drew from other sources, many associated with the faith he so resoundingly rejected – formally, at least.

The Talmud and The Torah, Isaac Babel and Saul Bellow. Groucho Marx and the Golem. The Second World War and The Holocaust.

Also, the disgust was personal. Raised by the unhappy and frustrated daughter of a Hasidic rabbi, a child of divorce, Richler absorbed much hypocrisy and false piety within the Mile End shtetl he would soon immortalize in his books. Montreal Jews weren’t pleased by his public scoldings either.

Silence or even caution were probably never an option for the brilliant, nervy kid from St. Urbain Street. “I don’t think the truth goes in and out of season, like hay fever or hockey,” Richler would later say. Neither would he deviate from his stated artistic purpose to be “an honest witness” to his age.

Starting in 1972, Mordecai Richler settled his large family and busy career back in his beloved Montreal, the only Canadian city he took seriously. His literary project had finally come clear: to chronicle the strivings of upwardly Fmmobile Jews in his hometown. Social comedies rooted in solid geographic and cultural ground – one immigrant group’s rise from poverty to prosperity, margins to mainstream. The novels St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now launched his major phase.

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At the same time, he continued publishing voluminous quantities of journalism, around half of it concerned with Canada and most of that excoriating. “Mordecai doesn’t dislike Canada,” a close friend once explained. “He just thinks it’s improvable.”

Journalism, Richler himself observed, deals with the “grammar” of human affairs, fiction the “essences.” Quick to a brawl and slow to back away, there were times he expended too much energy on the grammar.

Famously, his impatience with Quebec’s nationalist language laws boiled over in the early 1990s. Marshalling his network of international contacts, he ridiculed the sign laws in a 20,000-word New Yorker piece, later made into a book, and a BBC documentary.

For his public stance, this shy, introverted man, most at ease in a bar or at home with friends and family, found himself shouted at on the streets of Montreal. His country house was defaced with swastikas and excrement. Hate mail would later be sent to the hospital where he recovered from an operation.

That said, his finest novels appeared towards the end of his life. He aspired only to write about people charged with vitality and appetite, qualities he admired. A gifted stylist, his prose was dense and learned and always funny. “Chassidic in its intensity and delight in life,” as he wrote in praise of Saul Bellow.

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Published three years before his death, Barney’s Version was a Giller winner and bestseller in Canada and, curiously, Italy. Told with effortless propulsion, the novel is narrated by arguably his most memorable creation, the irrepressible Barney Panofsky.

Panofsky is a shill for bad Cancon television, a boozy critic of political correctness, and a possible murderer of his closest friend. Above all, he is the ardent lover of Miriam. Richler unfolds a tragic love story – a paean to the love of his own life, Florence – with a tenderness that surprised those under the impression he was all hard shell. He also portrays the haunting of an old man by Alzheimer’s.

Warm-hearted and vulnerable, Barney’s Version may even fall into a category Richler would have scoffed at – the endearing work of fiction. It is certainly the fan’s choice.

Solomon Gursky Was Here was different again. The result of 20 years of intermittent labour, and published in 1989 only after a heroic push, the novel was unlike anything else he wrote – or anything else in Canadian literature. In the Gursky clan, a bootlegging-to-booze empire, Richler had found a subject the match his talent. Seven generations of Gurskys crowd the nearly 600 pages of this sprawling, polyphonic saga. The cast of dozens and multiple storylines unfold within a time frame stretching from Victorian England to 1980s Montreal.

While the usual comedic mischief is at play, Richler has larger ambitions for Solomon Gursky Was Here. Tales told in the novel are too tall to credit. Characters, mostly a rogue’s gallery, are profane and defiant, even for him. Ephraim Gursky, for instance, survives the Franklin Expedition by eating only his own kosher food. He goes on to establish – and sire – a Millennial cult of Jewish Inuit. And so on, down through the generations.

Solomon Gursky Was Here recasts through a lens of Jewish exuberance everything from Indigenous mythology to colonial Arctic history, marginal and mainstream Montreal life, class and gender divides. It imagines a Canada of deeper intensity and delight. A “Chassidic” nation? In a way.

The novel is an invitation – or a challenge – to imagine the space we share outside our self-assigned laneways of identity, language, region and narrative. For some of us, it is among a handful of visionary novels about our unfinished country.

Why then the apparent disinterest in Richler a quarter-century after his death? Ironically, Quebec has made up with its “villain,” naming a Montreal library after him, retranslating his major works into Québécois French, and openly celebrating him as a native son.

From the archives: At long last, Mordecai Richler gains the respect of Quebeckers

English Canada, in contrast, has not kept faith in its “hero.” As he acknowledged, Richler was a chronicler of his times, and times – along with literary tastes – change. His voice, masculine and provocative, could tilt into the intemperate, especially when pressing a joke or grievance. Our age is quick to judge modes of expression declared deviant from our own progressive standards.

Finally, nearly all literary criticism now emanates from within our universities, and with few exceptions, the professors just haven’t been interested.

Time usually sorts things out for artists. Either the work endures or it doesn’t. Mordecai Richler had his day and may have another up ahead. The pleasures of this erudite, funny, deeply moral writer are many, and veteran readers will envy newcomers to his books, especially the novels. Meanwhile, the invitation of Solomon Gursky Was Here stands.