JOSHUA THEN AND NOW by Mordecai Richler; Knopf; 435 pages; $11.95
With his eighth and best novel, Mordecai Richler, the wandering Canadian, comes home. It is a place of great vitality, unabashed tenderness, grotesque humor and a grouchy reverence for things as they were. In some respects, the book is a Jewish Brideshead Revisited, the sacred and profane memoirs of an exaggerated autobiographical character named Joshua Shapiro, a Montreal writer and TV personality. A resemblance to Evelyn Waugh's novel is not farfetched. Richler twice borrows the comic master's line about the companions of his youth: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." In...
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