Volume 45, Number 4 · March 5, 1998
Pulling Down the Temple
By Thomas R. Edwards
Barney's Version
by Mordecai Richler
Knopf, 355 pp., $25.00
'I dislike most people I have ever met,' says the leading character of the latest of Mordecai Richler's tales about smart, ambitious Jewish-Canadian men at war with their culture. Barney's Version is wildly comic, but as with most good satire those who make fun of others also mock themselves. Richler's anti-heroes suffer from a kind of Samson complex, as if compelled to pull down the temple even though they are inside it at the time. Barney's Version, Richler's tenth novel, is as usual almost universally offensive—to both French- and Anglo-Canadians, assimilated Jews, feminists, black activists, liberals, right-wingers, the ignorant young and their querulous elders, politicians, writers, and anyone else claiming special consideration, but it also contains some surprises.
Review, 2937 words
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