Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk

Qalingu, now in the thick of the blizzard, was fast losing hope. His face was encrusted with snow and he could not make out the slightest thing. Nonetheless, he plodded on into the wind. His cheeks were freezing and his entire body was feeling the cold. With night falling, he decided to take shelter on the side of the hill away from the wind, while there was still some daylight. Without even a snow knife, he began digging a hole for himself in the snow, all the while afraid of being smothered by the blizzard.

Sanaaq is billed not only as "An Inuit Novel" but "The First Inuit Novel," or at least, the first novel written in the language Inuktitut. Author Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, it seems, was tasked by missionaries with helping to prepare educational materials in Inuktitut. But the project soon took on a creative bent, and Nappaaluk, seeking at first to show the use of the words in context, I suppose, wrote this novel, about the widow Sanaaq and her life among the nomadic people of far northern Quebec.

Above all else, Sanaaq is a portrait of what life was, or perhaps is, among the Inuit. Much of the novel is taken up by the ordinary tasks of life: sewing bags and mittens, building and deconstructing igloos, fishing and hunting--both of which, it seems, often must take place at a moment's notice, when the fish begun to run or the polar bear appears (or the fox, or the ptarmigan, or the seal, etc., etc.). But it's a life, too, that's close to death, and in Nappaaluk's simple prose, moments of intense disaster and loss take on tremendous meaning. I was really struck by one scene in which a character, splashed by boiling water, loses his eye, which is so melted it falls literally on the ground. Another scene, in which a hunter slips beneath a floe of pack ice and is lost forever, underscores just how fragile life must be at the top of the world, and how present the possibility of death and disaster. Among these moments of quotidian and not-so-quotidian life, Nappaaluk sketches a number of compelling characters: the headstrong widow and her impetuous daughter Qumaq among them.

One of the most interesting things about Sanaaq is that Naapaaluk captures the arrival and slow integration of Europeans into the life of the Inuit: the arrival of the first boat, the first airplane, the missionaries, the doctors and nurses. These watersheds are compacted in time, so that Sanaaq's life, simple as it is, seems to span centuries. At the beginning of the novel, Sanaaq and her family are terrified by the plane that roars for the first time overhead; by the end, Sanaaq's husband himself boards  a plane to join a work program for the Inuit. Disruption and change are inextricable from the arrival of Europeans and European-Canadians: at one point Sanaaq runs away with her injured daughter because she is afraid she will be taken from her to bring her to medical care. Sanaaq's husband reacts violently, and it is Sanaaq herself that ends up being sent away to the southern hospital, and the outside authorities, the priests and the police, visit her husband to reassert their authority. At the same time, it's clear that Sanaaq is the work of a pious Catholic; Sanaaq's own conversion--from Anglicanism!--is meant to serve as the novel's resolution. Sanaaq is an interesting artifact in that its attitude toward colonial presence is not quite what we would expect in the 21st century. Beyond that, it's a hell of a story.

Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

"Get on the sled and I will pull you up. See, there's the evening star--how near it looks! Jacques, don't you love winter?" She put the sled-rope under his arms, gave her weight to it, and began to climb. A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from the neighbours' houses. If the Count should go back with the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city (yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break just for this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of being in one's own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the sea.

I spent a day last week in Quebec City. If you've ever been there, you know it's not for the easily winded: it's built upon a huge rock called Cap Diamant, and the lower town, at the rock's bottom, and the upper town, on its peak, are linked by stairs so precipitous they have names like Escalier Casse-Cou, the break-neck stairs. It's in the middle of one of these climbs that Euclide Auclair, the apothecary at the heart of Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock lives. Symbolically, it shows something about Euclide's character. Though brought to Quebec from France in the service of the governing Count de Frontenac, Euclide serves the common people also, with steadfast prudence. And perhaps, more even than others, it demonstrates the way that the apothecary clings to the rock, like a sea bird in its nest, an isolated refuge in the midst of a large and wild place. Most of the novel takes place over the village's long winter, from the moment that the last boats leave for their treacherous journey back to France to the time they return along the St. Lawrence River. During that time, the colonists are truly cut off from France. Perhaps this is when they not only must fend for themselves but when they are most themselves.

Euclide, a widower, has a daughter named Cecile. Cecile is the light of the village; as Euclide is steadfast, she is virtuous and pure. It's Cecile who entreats the Count to provide shoes for her friend Jacques, the son of a base prostitute. Cecile, too, is a natural Canadian; though born in France, she has no memory of the place, and to her, the thought of being recalled to France is a frightening one. Cather, who was ever interested in the mythology of nation-making, is trying to pinpoint the moment, I think, that refugees from one place become the residents of another. Cecile is a real Canadian, not just a Frenchwoman clinging to the rock for fear of being swept out to sea. She boasts all the virtues of French civilization, including a devout Catholic piety, though in her they are transformed into something distinctly French Canadian. One can imagine this book might have been influential among the French Canadians, who insist politically and culturally on calling themselves a nation, if only it had avoided the original sin of being written in English.

It's difficult to read Shadows on the Rock without thinking about Death Comes for the Archbishop, which Cather had published four years earlier. Both books are about European, even French, exiles in the new world. Euclide is a humble apothecary, but he, and Cecile especially, seem hardly less the representatives of the faith than Bishop Latour. Both books suggest that the transposition to the New World enliven that faith and make it stronger; in Shadows of the Rock, we are treated to a long story about a devout Montreal anchorite whose devotion to solitude harkens back to a medieval piety no longer possible in Europe. Shadows on the Rock even provides a Bishop Latour-like figure, the Bishop Laval, a real figure whose tomb I saw in the basilica at Quebec. This figure--genial, wise, and forgotten by Europe--even gets a death scene at the end, a "good death" that mimics Latour's.

The comparison does Shadows on the Rock little favor. The mystery and ambivalence of Archbishop are largely supplanted here by a conservative devotion to the myth of missionary goodness. Euclide's steadfastness, Cecile's virtue, will not permit a scene like that in Archbishop in which Latour is brought to a secret cave where he hears the howling sound of ancient gods, nor will they permit a vision, like Latour has, of the Holy Family as part-Indigenous mestizos. The Indigenous, in fact, are kept largely off-screen, lurking as frightful threats and agents in the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries like Jean Brebeuf. (It would be interesting to compare this vision to Vollmann's Fathers and Crows, a novel that casts the Jesuit missionary work among the Hurons and Haudenosaunee in a more contemporary, and cynical, light.) I really enjoyed Cather's rich image of colonial life, and of course, the writing is as lovely as ever. (Don't you love the "paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the sea?") But I couldn't shake the feeling that the novel clings, like the colonists in Quebec, to a rock-like certitude.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately--the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws.

The "Infinite Jest" of Infinite Jest--that video cartridge that causes a viewer to become so entertained, they give up all will to live and become catatonically glued to their screen, even to the point of starvation and death--is called, by the Quebecois separatists and American operatives who search for it "the Entertainment." Entertainment is the subject--if anything can be said to be the subject--of this sprawling novel, itself a kind of Infinite Jest, meant to draw you in and keep you trapped. Like Finnegans Wake, it loops, bringing you from the "end" to the "beginning." The cycle starts afresh, and good luck getting out of it.

Although Infinite Jest sprawls over 1000+ pages and perhaps a couple hundred characters, it seemed to me that, ellipse-like, it has two main foci: the Enfield Tennis Academy, perched on a high Boston hill, and Ennet House, a recovery house for substance abuse addicts at the base of the very same hill. (The similarity of the names is surely no coincidence; maybe someone's written about what it means for the tennis kids to be "in" the "field" while the addicts are "in" the "net.") Enfield is the home of Hal Incandenza, whose father James, former head of the academy and amateur filmmaker, created the Entertainment prior to his suicide. Ennet is the realm of Don Gately, a recovering addict and warden of the halfway house.

The irony is that Enfield is as filled with addicts as Ennet: Hal and his pusher accomplice Michael Pemulis have saturated the academy with dope, and Hal himself is hopelessly addicted. The only difference, except that of class, between the academy on the hill and the halfway house beneath it is that the residents of the halfway house are in recovery. Quietly courageous beefcake Gately is, perhaps, an alternate version of Hal who emerged in different social circumstances; no coincidence, I think, that it's Don to whom Hal's father appears, in a hospital-induced fever, like Hamlet's father's ghost. ("A fellow of infinite jest," after all, is Hamlet's description of old, dead Yorick.)

Drugs and sports are both a kind of entertainment. The big theme of Infinite Jest, as I understand it, is the way we can be betrayed by the pleasure centers of our brain. Entertainment intensified becomes competition, becomes addiction; "The Entertainment" is a symbol of the harms we visit upon ourselves in the name of having fun. The novel emphasizes this, I think, in a million little ways. The new supranational order that forms the novel's political backdrop is called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N., a rather crude but on-theme joke about Onan, the figure known for being the Bible's most infamous masturbator. And the president who presides over this order is a former crooner named Johnny Gentle--DFW probably would not have been surprised by the number of 21st century world leaders, from Trump to Bolsonaro to Zelenskyy, who got their start as television actors. 

The politics-as-entertainment bit is underscored by Eschaton, the tennis-slash-nuclear-holocaust game that might be the novel's most enduring image. In one way, Eschaton is a classic Borgesian "map vs. territory" joke--by hitting a player with a ball, are you striking against something that exists in the world of Eschaton, or something outside of it? When it snows on the Eschaton map, is it snowing in the Eschaton world?--but in the context of the book as a whole it's another instance of geopolitics getting mixed up with the muddiness of entertainment. The consequences of this muddiness in the world of Infinite Jest are grim: New England has become almost entirely a toxic wasteland. The need to be entertained, too, opens up opportunities for capitalist grifters: in this world, years are named for corporate sponsors; Infinite Jest takes place mostly in the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment."

Infinite Jest is so capacious, so many-layered, has such an anything-goes spirit, you would think it wouldn't be able to surprise you. But I was genuinely surprised by the appearance of James Incandenza's ghost, or "wraith," who, we learn in the novel's late chapters, has been hanging around trying to push Hal toward some kind of personal growth. James, we learn, created "the Entertainment" for Hal, as a way of drawing him out of himself. Hal is cerebral, a skilled talker and wordsmith, but feels very little; he had no relationship with his father to speak of and feels nothing for his mother, not even anger at her sexual affair with the academy's #1 teen star. The immense world of Infinite Jest is suddenly contracted, and it becomes--as maybe it always was--a story about one dysfunctional family. The alcoholic James was never able to communicate with Hal when alive, but in death he hopes to pass some wisdom onto Hal at last. Entertainment, Wallace says, is good. It can be perverted and misused; we can become overly attached to it, even addicted; we can become blind to its boundaries, but ultimately, it allows us to connect with the world. To feel something.

I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of the way Wallace writes. I have a soft spot, actually, for the sections of Infinite Jest (and in his short fiction) where he tries on other voices, ventriloquisms, even when they sometimes border on--shall we say--political incorrectness. He had that gift really great writers have of being able to listen to people and reproduce the particularities of their language. But his own natural language strikes me as flaccid, recursive, overstuffed with numbers and abbreviations, with jargon and bad jokes. It has a natural ugliness that accurately reflects something contemporary, but which is ugly nonetheless. But it's perfectly pitched for this weird, wild, unwieldy story, and I felt more captivated by it by the end of the two weeks it took me to read Infinite Jest. Like Brent suggested, I had to flip back to the first thirty pages to really understand the import of the ending--which leaves Don and Hal both largely incapacitated, and the wheelchair assassins of Quebec about to descend on the tennis academy in search of the master of the killer tape. I could feel Wallace inviting me to begin the novel again, to get caught in its net. But I'm ready to move on to something else.

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.

Home Truths by Mavis Gallant

Now, of course there is much to be said on the other side; people who do not display what they feel have practical advantages.  They can go away to be killed as if they didn't min; they can see their sons off to war without a blink.  Their upbringing is intended for a crisis.  When it comes, they behave themselves.  But it is murder in everyday life--truly murder.  The dead of heart and spirit litter the landscape.  Still, keeping a straight face makes life tolerable under stress.  It makes public life tolerable--that is all I am saying; because in private people still got drunk, went after each other with bottles and knives, rang the police to complain that neighbors were sending poison gas over the transom, abandoned infant children and aged parents, wrote letters to newspapers in favor of corporal punishment, with inventive suggestions.  When I came back to Canada that June, at least one thing had been settled; I knew that it was all right for people to laugh and cry and even to make asses of themselves.  I had actually known people like that, had lived with them, and they were fine, mostly--not crazy at all.  That was where a lot of my confidence came from when I began my journey into a new life and a dream past.

It's hard not to be amazed by the short fiction of Mavis Gallant.  I leave every story floored by the clarity of her vision and the persuasiveness of life in them, the richness of detail; nothing ever seems faked or planned.  But that's only part of what makes them so terrific, and it's difficult to find the words to describe what exactly makes them so terrific.  They seem to waver between Edwardian traditionalism and jagged postmodernism.  Sometimes they seem so straightforwardly social-realist in the way they capture, for example, Montreal during World War II; other times they seem like impenetrable knots of consciousness.  (In fact, if these stories didn't hover so reliably around the war I don't know if I'd be able to place them in time at all.)  There always seems to be one character too many, and the themes are entirely elusive.

These stories explore what it means to be Canadian.  Home Truths is split into three sections: "Canadians at Home," "Canadians Abroad," and a cycle of stories about Linnet Muir, a young woman who returns home to Montreal after living in New York for a few years, and which seem like they must be at least partially autobiographical.  Gallant's characters often find themselves stationed at the battle lines of the war of language in Quebec, but in ways that are so understated they seem wholly irrelevant to the stories themselves, like the servant and mistress in "Jorinda and Jorindel" who sit for hours not talking to each other because they refuse to learn English, in the case of one, or French, in the other.  Canadians abroad are always anxious about their French and about not being seen as American.  In one terrific story, "Virus X," a young Canadian woman comes to Alsace to study, and looks anxiously over the border about Germany because her own German heritage is something that, at the time of the war, has always seemed hush-hush.  In these characters you can see, in real time, the Canadian identity emerging from Britishness during the war.

But like I said, this theme is never heavy-handed, and it would be hard to say that's what the stories are about, exactly.  But that must be what it's like to experience a changing cultural identity: it's folded so deeply into the fabric of life that changes fail to announce themselves with much fanfare.  They are also about women--Linnet's stories are all about what happens when, during the war, women come to occupy the jobs once held by men--and even children.  In her most modernist mode, Gallant has a great skill at describing the weird interior world of children, like the little girl who describes her parents this way: "But large, and old, and powerful, they have greater powers: they see through walls, and hear whispered conversations miles away."

Gallant can also be extremely funny, as in this passage from one of the Linnet stories:

"Well, Bolshie," he said to me.  This was a long joke: it had to do with my political views, as he saw them, and it was also a reference to a character in an English comic called "Pip and Squeak" that he and I had both read as children--we'd discussed it once.  Pip and Squeak were a dog and a penguin.  They had a son called Wilfred, who was a rabbit.  Bolshie seemed to be a sort of acquaintance.  He went around carrying one of those round black bombs with a sputtering fuse.  He had a dog, I think--a dog with whiskers.  I had told Mr. Tracy how modern educators were opposed to "Pip and Squeak."  The thought that more than one generation of us had been badly misled by the unusual family unit of dog, penguin, and rabbit.  It was argued that millions of children had grown up believing that if a dog made advances to a female penguin she would produce a rabbit.  "Not a rabbit," said Mr. Tracy reasonably.  "Wilfred."

Some of Home Truths was rereading for me; but I welcomed seeing stories like "The Prodigal Parent" and "In the Tunnel," which I think is sort of a masterpiece, again.  They're just so rich and multifarious, and while I don't think I could explain what seems different this time around, the experience of reading these stories again still had a kind of freshness.  I'm still trying to put my finger on what's so great about them, but I think that impulse--wanting to get inside these stories and figure out what makes them tick--speaks for itself.

Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler

In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings.  Neither am I a stranger to irony.  I realize that I -- who took the Second Mrs. Panofsky's rambling conversation to be an abomination -- have consumed hundreds of pages, piling digression upon digression, to avoid getting to that seminal weekend in the Laurentians that all but destroyed my life, rendering unto me my reputation as a murderer, which is believed by some to this day.  Enter Sergeant-Detective Sean O'Hearne.  And I'm willing to swear that what follows is the truth.  I am innocent.  Honestly.  So help me God, as they say.

Okay, let's stick with the Canadians for a bit.

Barney's Version was the last novel of Montreal writer Mordecai Richler, and it reads like the novel a man writes as he faces down his own obsolescence.  Barney Panofsky, a successful television producer, wants to write and publish a firsthand account of his own life.  When he has been in the public eye, it's always been as part of someone else's sordid account: his first wife, Clara, who committed suicide before her poetry and art could make her a feminist icon; the memoir of Canadian novelist Terry McIver, who knew and despised Barney during their youth in Paris; and especially the lurid newspaper accounts of Barney's trial for killing his best friend Boogie after finding him in bed with his wife.  What Barney wants to do is not so much "set the record straight"--there's a lot of admitted culpability here--but to provide the human context that makes every story seem a little bit more deserving of empathy.  Barney's tendency to forget basic facts and details in his advanced age tends to complicate this project.

The novel is a riot, in many senses: it's extremely funny; it's propelled along by a kind of manic energy; it manages to capture the spirit of the political tension in Quebec in the latter half of the twentieth century.  At times it reads like a much funnier Philip Roth novel, preoccupied as it is with the place of the aging male in the world of sex.  The cast of characters is immense, and borrows from several of other Richler books, which make a kind of Montreal Cinematic Universe (MCU).  I was particularly happy to see Duddy Kravitz, all grown up and having finally struck it rich, needling a doctor for an underheralded disease he might become a patron of, admitting him at last into high-toned Westmount society:

"Crohn's disease."

"Never heard of it.  Is it big?"

"Maybe two hundred thousand Canadians suffer from it."

"Good.  Now you're talking.  So tell me about it."

"It's also known as ileitis or ulcerative colitis."

"Explain it to me in laymen's terms, please."

"It leads to gas, diarrhoea, rectal bleeding, fever, weight loss.  You suffer from it you could have fifteen bowel movements a day."

"Oh, great!  Wonderful!  I phone Wayne Gretzky, I say, how would you like to be a patron for a charity for farters?  Mr. Trudeau, this is D.K. speaking, and I've got just the thing to improve your image.  How would you like to join the board of a charity my wife is organizing for people who shit day and night?  Hey there, everybody, you are invited to my wife's annual Diarrhoea Ball."

Juxtaposed against colorful characters like Duddy, Barney himself pales a little.  That's by design, I think: part of Barney's deal is that he has always been adjacent to famous and outsized personalities, writers and artists, without ever becoming one himself.  Even Boogie, on the fateful day when Barney did or did not murder him, cruelly accuses Barney of being a kind of sponge on the more talented.  But Barney has his talents, including a razor sharp wit, amplified by a hot temper.  He spends much of his life writing and sending fake letters designed to get people in trouble, a bit I'm confident is borrowed at least in part from that other Canadian Jew, Saul Bellow.

One thing that troubled me a little about Barney's Version is its depiction of feminists and other liberal activists.  Barney's involvement, and supposed cruelty toward, his first wife Clara sends feminist writers his way, talking about "penis-power."  At times Barney's version seems to paint him as the victim of a kind of liberal orthodoxy that echoes a lot of modern right-wing meme culture.  These tensions are inextricably tied up with liberal support for Quebecois independence and French language laws, which Richler saw as inseparable from Francophone anti-Semitism.  But even when you think you have Richler's politics pegged, he comes into undercut them, as when Clara's father, a Canadian Jew who has recently been tossed off the board of his daughter's foundation by two black women, admits that "These women forced me to take a good look at myself."  It's a relatively minor moment in the book, but the novel's whole ethos demands that kind of criticism.  If Barney deserves his own account of his life, doesn't Clara, who never got to tell her own?  Who is it in this world whose stories aren't being told?

Barney's Version exists on shifting ground.  Barney's incipient Alzheimer's makes every detail suspect, and his account is supplemented by a series of corrective footnotes by his son, Michael.  The effect is to make Barney seem more or less trustworthy, but to inject the slightest doubt into his narrative, and to emphasize the subjectivity of our own versions of ourselves.  What do we do with a man who can remember "Velazquez's portrait of that royal family" but not that it's called Las Meninas?  Barney talks about the moment where his friend Boogie disappears as that "seminal weekend in the Laurentians that all but destroyed my life," but that's not true.  The trial succeeds in alienating Barney from his wife, whom he hates, and allowing him to marry the true love of his life, Miriam.  (In a nice comic touch, they meet for the first time on the night of Barney's wedding to the woman he calls only "The Second Mrs. Panofsky.")  It's a smaller, tawdrier moment, a night of drunken cheating, that separates him from Miriam thirty years later and really marks the ruin of his life.  It lacks the high drama of the murder charge, but it is enough to make you wonder how much Barney really understands about himself.

Richler's not really a postmodernist.  The mystery of what happened to Boogie is resolved in a way that's as satisfying as any Agatha Christie novel.  But he understands, with a comic realist's eye, just how much of what we tell ourselves about own lives is fiction, or at least fictionalized.  He understands, too, the idea that Barney's Alzheimer's, diagnosed at the very end of the narrative, represents the loss of that fiction, and it's tragic: the loss of "Barney's Version" of himself, no less meaningful because it's not entirely true.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler

Duddy trudged up and down through the snow with an owner's sharp eye for fire hazards and signs of mischief.  He tried the ice on the lake with his foot.  It cracked.  He urinated into a snowbank, writing his name.  It's my land, he thought.  But the wind began to cut quicker across the fields, suddenly the sun went out like a light, it was dark, and Duddy began to shiver.  Jeez, he thought, why didn't I leave the car lights on?  He buttoned up the collar and began to strike matches.  Duddy was able to trace his footsteps until the snow began to fall again, and then he was in bad trouble.  He circled round and round, his teeth chattered, and twice he began to run.  He ran and ran to no purpose until he collapsed panting in the snow.  His feet burned from the cold, his eyes felt as if they were stuffed with sand, and he began to think what in the hell am I doing lost in a blizzard, a Jewish boy?  Moses, he recalled from Bible Comics, died without ever reaching the Promised Land, but I've got my future to think of.

Duddel Kravitz is what you might call an "operator": a man with his hand in many money-making schemes, from selling pinball machines to filming bar mitzvahs.  He has his eyes set on a pristine tract of land surrounding a lake in Quebec's Laurentian Mountains, because as his grandfather tells him, "a man without land is nothing."  He buys up the parcels of land, one by one, using his older girlfriend Yvette's name because he's still too young to buy property legally--somewhere, over the course of the book, between sixteen and twenty.

I picked up this book because it's set in Montreal, where I was about to spend a couple of days.  Richler is well-known in Montreal, but his legacy is controversial because he was a longtime critic of the Quebec language policies that are designed to affirm the city's Francophone character.  As an Anglophone Jew who grew up in Montreal's Mile End neighborhood (now, like the Lower East Side, a trendy neighborhood), Richler was highly attuned to the way that the language laws enshrined Quebecker Jews as Other.  The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is steeped in Jewish culture and mannerisms, like a Malamud novel or a Woody Allen film.  It has the kind of self-deprecating humor that seems so characteristic of Jewish writing: observe how Duddy, having made friends with a goyische millionaire, can't understand why soliciting his new friend for the contract collecting scrap at his factories would be considered gauche, or that the millionaire has never heard of a Jewish criminal magnate known in Duddy's community as "the Boy Wonder."

The book is often wildly funny; at one point Duddy hires a blacklisted filmmaker to help him make his bar miztvah movies.  The filmmaker insists on total artistic control, and the film ends up a cut-rate Un Chien Andalou:

NARRATOR: Today you are a man, Bernard son of Moses.

18.  (Montage) Lightning.  Close shot of Michelangelo's statue of David.  Cartoon of a Thurber husband.  African tribal dance.  Close shot of a venereal disease warning in a public urinal.

Duddy's lust for money could, in the hands of a non-Jew or a less capable writer, make him seem like a walking stereotype.  But Duddy's greed is counterbalanced by a boyish simplicity and a sensitivity for others that even he seems not aware of.  When an epileptic he employs as a driver--a great, absurdly earnest character who considers Duddy the "Branch Rickey of epileptics" for giving him a chance--is paralyzed in an accident, he is crushed with guilt and lets his business empire go to ruin--at least temporarily.  But these qualities are often in direct competition with his greed, and his obsessive need for the land.  As his uncle writes him, "A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one.  He murders the others."  The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, for all its excellent humor, gets is pathos from the overriding question of what man Duddy will choose to be, and which of his two selves he'll murder.