Mordecai Richler by Arnold E. Davidson (review)

HUMANITIES 4j7 influential discussion of MacLennan's fiction' in 'A Nation's Odyssey'; Elspeth Cameron is acknowledged for having contributed a biography of MacLennan 'with commendable thoroughness: This book should prove valuable to university students as a convenient survey of MacLennan. To scholars, it will be of little interest because it is limited by the restrictions of the series format which precludes in-depth analysis or any major contribution to MacLennan criticism. (ELSPETH CAMERON) Arnold E. Davidson. Mordecai Richler Frederick Ungar Publishing. v, 20J. $16.75 A querulous, aggressive writer and one of the major presences in contemporary Canadian literature, Mordecai Richler has fostered an incomplete and surprisingly timid criticism. The best available booklength study is still George Woodcock's Mordecai Richler, but it was published before Sf. Urbain's Horseman and Joshua Then and Now and suffers too from a reluctance to consider the contexts - political as well as literary - fundamental to Richler's fiction. Arnold E. Davidson's new appraisal, in Ungar's Literature and Life series, is more comprehensive, but is just as uneven in its analytical judgments and in its selection of thematic and formal emphasis. Although Davidson's general argument about Richler's 'complexity of moral vision' (p 70) and'careful control of narrative distance' (p 82) is judicious and well organized, he exercises little ingenuity in dealing with the need for summary which is part of the introductory purpose served by the Ungar volumes. Davidson describes Richler's stories well and at length, but often to the exclusion of details that make up the striking continuity in the'novels of character' and the satires. Davidson also accepts the constraints imposed by Richler's reticence about his personal life, so much so that Richler's voice, a sense of his temperament, barely emerges in the opening, biographical chapter even though the requisite information is covered. It may not be possible to know what precise connection there was between Richler's relationship with Florence Wood and the change in his fiction from the darkness of A Choice of Enemies to the comedy of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. But Richler's grocery-store aesthetic, his many statements about his success and literary purposes, are readily available and are of great importance because of their ambivalence, their self-mocking and studied vulgarity. 'I bring in the meat,' he told Graeme Gibson, 'andit can be stamped any way you [want): Davidson scrutinizes the novels with a keen awareness of the rapid transformations in Richler's approach to character and narration: from the 458 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 psychological cliches and'strained, stilted' language (p 27) of The Acrobats to the 'remarkably skillful use of shifting pOints of view' (p 82) in Duddy Kravitz and the complex moral nuances of St Urbain's Horseman. He correctly points to the centrality in this process of Richler's third novel, A Choice of Enemies, and deftly sketches the ambiguous bond between Norman, the self-deceiving protagonist, and Ernst, the agent of destruction who acts 'in better faith' (p 74). The discussion of Duddy Kravitz is more conventional and derivative, yet effectively underlines the mixture of aggressiveness and insecurity (p 86) in Richler's 'spiky' innocent. But the exact tones, the easy vitality, ofRichler's first complete comedy remain untouched by Davidson's solemnity and thematic concentration. The range of satire in Cocksure and the personal crises in Joshua Then and Now seem to have engaged him more fully. Despite an excessive topicality and a degree of 'sophomoric' humour (p 136), Cocksure is 'an impressive allegory' (p 121). 'Out of step with his time' (p 125), Mortimer Griffin is the symbolic Jew inevitably sacrificed to the Star Maker, 'the end product of abstract will' and modern narcissism (p 133). For Davidson the strength of Richler's most recent novel, Joshua Then and Now, is in its carefully maintained balance of farce, social criticism, and the near-melodrama of suicide, incest, and revenge. The central perception of the study is that in 'Richler's best realistic fiction there is a kind of multifocal effect, a blurring of image that emphasizes the problems of judging' (p 141). Although invaluable as an approach to Richler...