Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler

When Callaghan returned, he settled into his chair, reached for the bottle and said, "Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish the famine; and Jews the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from the Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are still huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared by the Americans on one side and the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do our damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper's shop in Inverness or the shtetl or the bog. What was I talking about?"

"Solomon."

Moses Berger is consumed by two things: alcoholism and Solomon Gurksy. Solomon was--or is--a member of the infamous Gursky family, who rose from obscurity to conquer the bootlegging industry in Canada, eventually becoming powerful and respected men of business. Solomon, embroiled in a bitter rival with his brother Bernard, the company's CEO, died years before in a mysterious crash on his way to the Arctic. Moses, whose association with the Gurskys goes back to his childhood, when his poet father was hired as a speechwriter for Bernard, has become obsessed with the question of what happened to Solomon. Was he murdered? If so, by whom? And why was his body never found? And who's ominously leaving dead ravens everywhere, and is it the same person secretly buying up shares of Gursky stock under the name "Corvus?"

Solomon Gurksy is based on the real-life Bronfman family, who turned a bootlegging operation into the Canadian conglomerate now known as Seagram, one of the largest liquor companies in the world. But Richler takes an interesting story and turns it into an epic, stretching across the length of the Canadian continent and the breadth of history. The history of the Gursky family is inextricable from the history of Canada: Solomon's grandfather Ephraim, sources suggest, was a member of John Franklin's ill-fated expedition to find the Northwest Passage, and the only one who survived (by stowing away Jewish soul food, naturally, and avoiding the poisoned lead cans that drove the others insane). In the Inuit communities of Arctic Canada, Berger discovers, there are those who still go by the surname Gor-ski or Ger-ski, Ephraim's descendants. More surprising still, Ephraim seems to have inculcated in his Inuit friends a nascent branch of Orthodox Judaism.

We learn that, when Solomon was a child, Ephraim took him on a trip to the Artic Ocean from which Solomon was forced to return alone, without assistance or supplies. Solomon, if only in spirit, is Ephraim's true heir: an adventurous spirit, willing to do anything it takes to survive and advance. But it's Bernard who manages to muscle Solomon out of the way, supplanting him with a shrewder, more modern sense of business, where intrigue happens in the boardroom, rather than on the tundra, or in an illegal Manitoba distillery.

There's something of The Adventures of Augie March in Solomon Gursky: Bellow, though he was a Canadian Jew like Richler, tried to imagine a story that would weave Jewishness permanently into the American fabric. Richler does the same here for Canada: in Ephraim, Richler makes a European Jew one of the very first Canadian colonizers, for good and bad. (The way in which Richler insinuates Jewishness into Inuit religion may or may not be intentionally suspect; I'm not sure.) In Solomon, he illustrates the way in which the pioneering spirit of Jewish Canada is marginalized, attacked, and eliminated by social climbers who prefer to forget that Canada is the "disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples."

All this seems undeniably cool. So why did this book leave me so cold? Solomon Gursky, I felt, ends up far less than the sum of its parts, and there are so many parts. My description above leaves out at least two dozen semi-major characters: the third Gursky brother, Morrie; their father, Aaron; Berger's lovers Lucy and Beatrice; Solomon's son Henry, living as a devout Hasid in the Northwest Territories; Henry's  resentful son Isaac; Bernard's consigliere Harvey; Berger's mentor Hyman Kaplansky; several rough-and-tumble French Canadians; a customs inspector; a Chinese hotel owner in Alberta; a pair of North Carolinian furniture magnates; a bush pilot; I don't know who else. Richler jumps between the perspectives of these in a way that's meant to build tension around the novel's central mysteries, and to conceal important information for a later reveal, but which in practice I found utterly bewildering. I still have no real idea of why Moses was so obsessed with Solomon, and while I'm pretty sure I understand what happened to him in the end, if I'd have blinked, I would have missed it. Solomon Gursky may still be alive, but when he's in set down the middle of this Where's Waldo diptych of a novel, what does it matter?

In some ways, Solomon Gursky a pastiche made from Richler's other, better novels. Gursky himself is a version of the titular avenging Jew of St. Urbain's Horseman; the mystery of his murder isn't nearly as satisfying as the one in Barney's Version. Solomon Gurksy adds to these novels a sweeping, epic scale, but for me, it swept away much of what made those novel's work.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Young husbands were stern, in those days.  Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies.  Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving.  Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies.  What a lot they had to learn, and so quickly.  How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.  How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century.  It was the women, then, who could slip back--during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children--into a kind of second adolescence.  A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed.  Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn't there.

The first and title story of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, a collection for which, no matter how hard you try, you'll never remember how the title words are ordered, is uncharacteristically optimistic.  I don't mean to say that Munro's stories are bleak or sad, but they are honest about the realities of fortune; adulterers and new spouses take big gambles on happiness, which pay off incompletely, if at all, but the chance of illness and disease are surer bets.  "Hateship" is a story in which fortune works out with almost comic grace: a pair of young girls play a cruel trick on their housekeeper, writing letters as if they are a distant acquaintance, claiming to be head over heels in love with her.  When the housekeeper throws caution to the wind, quits her job, and climbs upon a train to Saskatchewan with an entire trousseau packed away in the next car, we expect disaster.  But when she arrives she finds her "beau" catastrophically ill with fever, and once she's nursed him back to health, he's wise enough not to question why or how she arrived.

It's a charming story, and intriguingly structured: Munro follows one point-of-view character at a time, "handing off" the story to the next when they are encountered in the narrative, from the trainyard clerk to the housekeeper to the girls to their father, and so on.  It's a method that seems cribbed from film, which is funny, because few short story writers seem as cinematic as Munro.  The other stories have few surprises--beyond the surprises of life that Munro relishes, I mean--and for the first time I felt a dim sense that these stories were deeply familiar.  Something of the freshness of Munro has worn away for me, replaced by a very different sensation, that of settling into something friendly and familiar--an old worn armchair feeling.

Many of her usual themes are evident here.  There are fewer bad men than usual, but there is Mr. Vorguilla in "Queenie," a demanding and cruel old widower who whisks the narrator's young half sister away to Toronto in a misbegotten marriage.  Adultery is all over the place, from the imagined ("Post and Beam") to the brief and epiphany-like ("Floating Bridge," "What is Remembered," "Nettles") to sustained and life-altering ("Queenie," "Comfort," "The Bear Came Over the Mountain").  There's lots of illness and death: in "Comfort," Munro invents a hardcore atheist schoolteacher, Lewis, who is dying of ALS.  He's a prig and a boor, but his values are sincere and deeply held, not unlike Del's mother in The Lives of Girls and Women, and his wife struggles with how to honor her husband's skepticism at the end of his life, when the idea of his immortal soul would be of great comfort.  In "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," maybe the collection's best story and one of Munro's most anthologized works, Grant places his wife of fifty years, Fiona, in a nursing home because she is suffering from Alzheimer's.  When he visits, she seems only to dimly remember him, and yet he has to watch as she forms an intense bond, even a love, for another patient.

Another story, "Family Furnishings," tells of an eccentric old aunt, estranged from the narrator, who learns only late in life that her aunt was deeply offended by the way the narrator seized on a stray remark of hers and used it in her fiction.  Like "Material," one of my favorite stories of Munro's, it deals with the ethical question of using real life people in our writing: real life, of course, being the only resource we have, and yet even though the aunt's words have been totally recontextualized, something essential has been betrayed.  More than any of the stories here, I wondered if "Family Furnishings" was drawn from an experience in Munro's own life.  Is it permissible to use other people in our stories?  We already do, Munro answers, all the time, in the kind of narratives we construct around our lives, which always serve ourselves more than those who are supporting characters; in our memory we tell stories that real people--like Fiona, for example--will always betray.  That's a sure bet as anything.  But like in the title story, sometimes the stories we tell have a way of coming true.