Shana Rosenblatt Mauer. <i>Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values</i>

Shana Rosenblatt Mauer’s Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values is a long-overdue critical assessment of the provocative and humorous author’s entire corpus of novels, spanning 1954 to 1997. Despite multiple biographies of Richler and decades of scattered scholarship about his novels, Mauer’s is the first scholarly book-length study of its kind. Her study places the novels into the context of Richler’s other output: not only his scripts and nonfiction publications, but also, importantly, his public interviews. Richler and his writings often provoked considerable reaction from the Canadian public, and Mauer incorporates this context as well, examining common claims made about Richler: that he was an anti-Canada, anti-Israel, self-hating Jew, and that his novels were sexist, homophobic, racist, and illiberal. In Mauer’s evaluation, such responses to Richler’s fiction have obscured the moral values his novels espouse.Throughout the book, Mauer is clear that Richler’s novels did, at times, merit the criticisms they received. As he himself acknowledged, his women characters were often one-dimensional; his depictions of racialized and queer characters frequently use these characters as the butt of jokes, rather than acknowledging the impact of the racism and homophobia he also depicts. Mauer’s project is not to recuperate Richler, in other words, but rather to clarify and nuance scholarly and popular claims about his writings.Early on, Mauer maps out what would become a pattern with Richler’s novels: a warm and positive critical reception followed by heated popular uproar that sometimes overshadowed the actual content of the book itself. Beginning with the 1955 publication of Richler’s second novel, Son of a Smaller Hero, Mauer describes how “MacLean’s magazine awarded the novel its fiction prize but soon after reneged on its commitment to print excerpts. Despite the accolades of critics . . . many felt that Richler’s second publication, with its portrayal of mercenary, provincial Montreal Jews, was tinged with anti-Semitism. The din of the social outcry almost drowned out the plaudits of the reviewers” (4).Richler had anticipated this outcry, as both his personal correspondence and the front matter to the novel itself make clear. At the beginning of Son of a Smaller Hero, he warns, “Any readers approaching this book in a search for ‘real people’ is completely on the wrong track and what’s more, has misunderstood my whole purpose. Son of a Smaller Hero is a novel, not an autobiography” (qtd. in Mauer 19).What’s more, in Mauer’s view, this public outcry also muffled what she calls Richler’s “moral agenda,” or what he himself referred to as “values” (7). Richler’s fiction—especially his later novels—dramatizes the quest for values, honor, and dignity by repeatedly placing a dyad at its center, a hero figure and a protagonist who idolizes him: “This pattern creates a space for decency and goodness in a fictional world characterized by a deterioration of such values” (7). Richlerian heroes are unconventional: larger-than-life, messianic, elusive, and apt to disappear and sometimes reappear under mysterious circumstances. They are “without exception, Jews—Ashkenazi Jewish men who exhibit integrity and live by an honest, if not perfect, moral posture” (23). Richler’s heroic characters inspire the protagonists—who rarely meet them in person—and “introduc[e] a justification for an ongoing belief in the potential of human decency” (8). Richler’s protagonists, in Mauer’s assessment, attempt to live with a Jewish moral code while simultaneously struggling with real-world issues that their heroic doubles escape through their mythical exploits.Together, the composite moral code created by the doubled protagonist-hero narrative structure offers “a corrective to timid, law-abiding Jewish [establishment] compliance,” one that “is expressed through dignified yet ordinary values and fantastical heroics” (25). The protagonists’ “ordinary values” include family loyalty, both to their family of origin (and by extension the Jewish community) and to their spouse(s) and children; and a respect for, if not a participation in, Old World Jewish tradition, often represented in contrast to Richler’s lampooning of “upwardly mobile Jewish striv[ing] for acceptance in Gentile social circles” (43).In contrast to what she terms the protagonists’ “ordinary Jewish values,” Mauer suggests that Richler’s heroes’ “Jewish heroics” reflect these characters’ more unconventional lives (24–25). Heroic Jewish values vary between novels, “but they are usually based upon an idealized sense of justice, Jewish empowerment, rightful vengeance, a libidinous spirit, and an unapologetic quest for pleasure that is far removed from rabbinic stringency and Talmudic wariness” (47). These heroics are venerated by the protagonists and the novels themselves, even as they represent an unrealistic code of behavior. Richler’s unconventional heroic values thereby “force a reinterpretation of what it means to be an ideal Jew in the modern era” (75). For Mauer, Richler’s novels at once construct a family- and community-oriented vision of diasporic Jewish values, at the same time that they embrace a fantasy of world-traveling Dionysian heroism. In so doing, Richler attempts to offer a version of Jewish values calibrated for a secular, gentile-dominated society.Mauer’s examination of how the protagonist-hero pattern functions in Richler’s novels forms the book’s structure and argument. The chapters of Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values are organized to demonstrate different ways in which Richler’s fiction interrogates the moral values held by protagonists and heroes. Individual chapters focus on the motif of messianism, particularly in Richler’s heroic characters, including some false or sham messiahs; Richler’s satire of political correctness; his parodies of a Canadian patriotism that ignores tense Anglophone-Francophone relations and the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples; and his fascination with the connections between aesthetics, culture, and morals, often demonstrated through depictions of characters who are writers, artists, and intellectuals.The chapter on Richler’s depictions of political correctness is an adept analysis of Richler’s representations of real-world cultural events and movements. Drawing on almost all of Richler’s novels as well as multiple articles by him, Mauer explains how Richler’s perspective on what he called “special pleading” did not meaningfully evolve. Instead, his novels deride movements and beliefs such as feminism, Indigenous rights, Black rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, in a way that she suggests “may be reductive and even stagnant, a reflex rather than a substantive response” (99). The novels similarly ridicule characters who are feminist, Indigenous, Black, disabled, and queer. The bravado and hypersexuality of Richler’s macho Ashkenazi hero figures contrasts significantly with characters who espouse the beliefs he critiques. And his protagonists’ wives and girlfriends—usually the positive female characters—are anti-feminist: “excessively beautiful with a quiet, reserved intellect—[. . .] alluring but not sexually aggressive; they are effortlessly graceful and domestic, never careworn or unkempt” (106). Mauer concludes, “Richler’s novels are more an indictment of liberal guilt than an appeal to examine society’s countless inequities” (128).While Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values aims to study all ten of Richler’s novels, its focus is perhaps unavoidably unevenly distributed. Certain novels—Son of a Smaller Hero, Solomon Gursky Was Here, St. Urbain’s Horseman, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Barney’s Version, and Joshua Then and Now—receive extensive treatment across the chapters; A Choice of Enemies earns a single footnote. This variation may be due to the argumentative structure that Mauer employs, of emphasizing the doubled hero-protagonist plot, which is not shared by all of Richler’s novels. At times, this structure splits apart analyses that might be helpfully combined. For instance, the insightful interrogation of Richler’s depictions of Indigenous characters and other characters of color in chapter 4, “Hero Figures and Special Pleading,” does not refer to Richler’s satire The Incomparable Atuk (1963). The titular Atuk’s disastrous rise to fame as a tokenized Inuit poet does not follow the protagonist-hero structure, and so Mauer includes it in the following chapter, “Anti-heroic Canada,” demonstrating instead how Atuk and other Indigenous characters in Richler’s oeuvre indicate Richler’s criticisms of Canadian culture and the country’s mistreatment of its Indigenous inhabitants.The book closes with a lengthy analysis of Richler’s final novel, Barney’s Version (1997), reflecting on how the book continues, redirects, and complicates many of the moralistic themes Mauer analyzes in Richler’s earlier novels. She compellingly demonstrates how the novel actually criticizes Richler’s earlier novels’ value systems, becoming itself “a cautionary tale about the perils of a fixed value system, impervious to social, political, and cultural change” (190). Mauer’s readings of the Barney Panofsky-Boogie Moscovitch protagonist-hero dynamic are perceptive, as are her explorations of characters such as Joey Hersh in St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971)—Richler’s earliest Jewish hero character—and Solomon Gursky in Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989). She also draws connections between Richler’s plots, politics, and characters and those of writers such as George Orwell, E. M. Forster, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, A. M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Leonard Cohen. Throughout Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values, Mauer questions and refines some of the blanket condemnations that have been leveled at Richler and his writings—of Jewish self-hatred, anti-Israel bias, anti-Canadian sentiment, and political incorrectness, while also revealing the moral heft behind the humor and satirical bite of Richler’s characters and plots. Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values is a useful contribution to the study of Richler’s fiction, one that should inspire many more such studies.

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