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 addition, the prodigal North American seems to have learned much from Waugh about episodic plotting and mixing poignant and farcical events.
Joshua Then and Now is unequivocally eventful, a circus of family entanglements, class conflicts, foreign and domestic adventures, sexual and criminal escapades, satire about life in literary London and semiliterate Hollywood. Shapiro is not the sort of writer to sit around massaging sexual guilts or nursing orchids of sensibility. He knows his craft but would rather talk about hockey, the Louis-Conn fight and the Spanish Civil War.
Joshua's childhood has left little room for pretensions. Like the author, he was born and raised in the low-rent Jewish section of Montreal, the background for Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain's Horseman. Shapiro's father Reuben is an ex-boxer and oldtime bootlegger who helped the Colucci family collect gambling debts and gave unorthodox religious instructions to his son: "There are ten commandments. Right? Well, it's like an exam. I mean, you get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class." Mother Shapiro is a former stripper and late-blooming porno actress who pops the eyes of Joshua's adolescent friends with a fan dance at her son's bar mitzvah.
Clearly Richler's hero does not have Alexander Portnoy's complaint. There are troubles enough. When first encountered, Joshua, 47, is recovering from multiple fractures suffered in an accident whose cause remains cloaked until novel's end. There are other details with delayed explanations. Why is this father of three and husband to the beautiful Pauline Hornby wearing lacy panties while talking to the police? Why is Pauline hospitalized with a nervous breakdown? Is Dr. Dr. Mueller (he has two degrees) really an ex-Nazi living on Ibiza?
Most questions are answered in due time. In the Richlerian calendar this means flipping back and forth from Montreal of the '30s and '40s, London and Spain of the '50s and la belle province of the present.
It is quite a narrative trick, one that allows the author to hit the emotional highs and bawdy lows of Shapiro's lurch through a world of dubious achievements and even more dubious respectability. Joshua, with his raffish background and inherited street smarts, is an arbiter of such matters. Most of his childhood friends make it to Montreal's affluent suburbs and lose their roots in wall-to-wall carpeting. To put on occasional airs is human, but to be a full-time phony is to risk devastating caricature, like Yossel Kugelman who becomes Psychiatrist Jonathan Cole, author of the bestseller My Kind, Your Kind, Mankind.